Stein Mehren (born 16. mai 1935 in Oslo, died 28. juli 2017 in Oslo) was a Norwegian author and painter. Mehren was                                                                   son of doctor and dentist Haakon Mehren (1910–38) and Solveig Marie Klaveness Bjerke (1908–55), and later got Einar
                                                             Friis Jarøy as adoptive father. He sttudied science in Oslo and  München, English language and literature at the University
                                                             of Cambridge, and then philosophy and  history of religion in Oslo.
 

                                                             Author

                                                             As author he mainly wrote poetry, but also novels, essays and plays. He debuted with the collection of poems                                                                                       called  Gjennom stillheten en natt i 1960.

                                                             His debut as a playwright came with the play Narren og hans hertug, which had a premiere at Nationaltheatret (Oslo)                                                                       with brilliant criticism. The director was Per Bronken, and the play had original music composed by Finn Ludt, with dance                                                                 coregraphed by Edith Roger Edith Roger. Mehren had based the play on the late medieval power play and intrigue, and
                                                             categorically rejected that the play was construed as a commentary on the contemporary. In the play the fool was the rebel
                                                             against the rulers, in particular the nobility, the church and the court. 
 

A major theme of Mehren's writing is the relationship between nature and consciousness. In the early stages, one notices the despair of the insurmountable distinction between human consciousness and the rest of nature.Starting with the collection Aurora Det Niende Mørke (1969) it looks as though it may look like he is finding a solution by highlighting the poem and the myth as the place where nature can come to consciousness about itself: «Songs that can bring nature out of the darkness / complaints, longings, give them beauty, voice, form / The song - which also brings man back to nature.»

From the 1980s a darker tone comes into the poems. Sickness and death come in as a motive, and past motives such as childhood and love are touched by grief and crisis. Now it is often the love that is over that is portrayed.

In his essayism and also in the two novels The Indistinct and the Titans, he unfolded a culture-critical activity, where he was just as happy to attack the politicization of art in the 1970s as the social democracy's planning and custodial community.

One of his most famous poems is the love poem "I Hold Your Head" from the collection Towards a World of Light (1963).
 

Visual artist
He debuted as a visual artist in 1993 with paintings exhibited at Galleri Haaken in Oslo, and also published several books in which poems and pictures were put together, for example, Love Poems (1997)