In 2001 he was awarded the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s culture award. In the same year Sonsteby helped defeat a proposal to name a street in Oslo after the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, who had welcomed the wartime German occupation of his country and given his Nobel Prize for Literature as a gift to the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Hamsun later flew to meet Hitler at Hitler’s mountain lair in Bavaria. At the time Sonsteby said Norway should dissolve parliament and declare a dictatorship before so naming a street. But in the end he came to consider that commemorating Hamsun was acceptable, as long as the writer’s literary talent and political affiliation received equal attention.