Her father's brother Rolf Hofmo (1898–1966) was a sports official who was arrested during World War II and imprisoned at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

[2] [3] Hofmo started her literary career submitting poems for publication to a wide variety of presses, including the communist newspaper Friheten and weekly magazines such as Hjemmet.

It was published in Magasinet for Alle, opening with the lines: The words, shiningly silentI shall findgive them to you, hammer some moments togetherunder the frame of eternityso you will never forget meRuth Maier was an Austrian native who had found refuge in Norway in 1939.

Among her most noted contributions are a lengthy debate on the minimal daily cost of living a life barely out of penury in Paris and a treatise in defense of her poet colleague Olav Kaste (1902-1991).

[6] She was institutionalized at Gaustad Hospital, suffering from mental illness, characterized as schizophrenia, paranoid type, from 1955 to 1971, leading to what was known as her "16 years of silence."