Alexander Rybak

Known first as a violinist, Minsk, Belarus-born multi-talent Alexander Rybak (May 13, 1986) has carved out a name for himself as a singer, songwriter, pianist and actor, straddling the classical and pop worlds as both a composer and Eurovision winner. Alexander Rybak was destined for a musical career –his father the renowned violinist Igor Rybak and his mother also a violinist and music journalist. His father defected from what was then the Soviet Union to Norway in 1991 and the family eventually resettled in the municipality of Nesodden in the early 1990s. He began learning the violin aged 5 and enrolled at the Barratt Due Institute of Music in Oslo aged 10. During his early twenties, Alexander Rybak began forging a career as a pop singer and entered the 54th Eurovision Song Contest in Moscow, Russia in 2009. He won the competition for Norway with the Norwegian folk inspired-track "Fairytale," also hitting a new record with 387 points, the most ever earned in Eurovision history. Shortly after, he released his debut album Fairytales – an English-language reverie that mixed Eastern European folk, schlager music and western pop – which he mostly wrote and composed by himself and which topped the albums chart in Norway and Russia as well as making it into the Top 20 in nine countries. He performed "Fairytale" at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert, held at the Oslo Spektrum, in December 2009. Alexander Rybak released his follow-up album, No Boundaries, in 2010 – which went to Number 7 in Norway – spent the next decade growing his profile as a teen idol in  Scandinavia, eastern – singing in both Russian and English – released three more albums – including fifth studio album and first Norwegian-language album, Trolle og den magiske fela (2015) and a string of singles including 2012's folktronica single "Leave Me Alone" and 2018's "That's How You Write a Song," which represented Norway in the Eurovision Song Contest 2018 in Lisbon, Portugal. In 2021, Alexander Rybak released "Stay" with Armenian singer and songwriter Sirusho.