Tvedt has studied the Nile for many years and traveled extensively in the Nile Basin. His latest book on the topic is The Nile. History’s Greatest River (IB Tauris 2020). See contents and reviews here. The Nile. The River of History became a rare non-fiction best-seller in Norway. The book have been/is about to be translated into Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, German, Italian and Serbian. The already published German version is entitled Der Nil. Fluss Der Geschichte, Berlin: Links Verlag. See reviews Zuddeutsche Zeitung and Frankfurther Allgemeine.
Other books on the Nile are The River Nile in the Age of the British (2004), hardback and paperback editions were published by IB Tauris (London) and American University Press (Cairo) and translated into Arabic in 2018. He was the editor of The River Nile in the Post-Colonial Age with contributions from researchers from the Nile basin countries. He has also published three volumes bibliographies on the Nile (about 3000 entries) and a two volume bibliography on South Sudan (2004), having about 7000 entries registering all literature in all disciplines on South Sudan from 1850 to 2002. See also his entry on the Nile in the Oxford Encyclopedia Britannica, African History (2017).
Below is the link to his Nile documentary, «The Nile Quest» in three episodes. It takes the viewer on a journey through thousands of years of Nile history and up the river from the Mediterranean through Egypt to Sudan, South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Eritrea and Ethiopia.
Episode I: The River of history
Episode II: Revolt at the sources
Episode III: «War or Peace»
Here are some short clips from the documentary:
Desert and river in Nubia, Sudan
«Draining the swamp» – the Jonglei Project
Up the White Nile to Murchison Falls in Uganda
Flying helicopter up the Blue Nile Valley, Ethiopia
Taking the colonial railway to the Nile lake, Kenya
The Nile – a World River, Rome
The Nile has intrigued historians and poets since the days of the Pharaohs; this most famous river has been the subject of hundreds of poems and thousands of books, from Herodotus and Virgil and the travel notes of Islamic scholars and European novelists to the many modern books about Nile geology, hydrology, dams and politics. The Nile basin was home to many polities, and more than thousand language groups, two world religions and other African religions, Arabs and Africans, Western empires and Muslim states. No international river basin has a longer or more complex and eventful history of water politics than the Nile’s. The deep, silent and almost ‘timeless’ connections between river and culture and river and society have affected both the societies in the Nile basin and the river itself, and it is this story that has fascinated Tvedt and he has described in his work.
‘In the Nile Basin the past is in the present and the present in the past, but nobody can escape the impact of the Nile’s power and its history.’ The River Nile in the Age of the British, p. 326.