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Contents Debutant 03 Kaspar Colling Nielsen Novels 03 Charlotte Weitze 04 Christina Hesselholdt // Hans Henrik Møller 05 Lisbeth Brun // Lone Aburas 06 Lone Hørslev // Morten Brask 07 Simon Glinvad Finnegan’s List 07 Johannes Ewald 08 Henrik Pontoppidan // Henrik Nordbrandt Poetry 09 Søren Ulrik Thomsen // René Jean Jensen Children’s Books 10 Ida Jessen & Hanne Bartholin // Lene Kaaberbøl 11 Bent Haller // Louis Jensen Crime 12 Claes Johansen // Michael Katz Krefeld Graphic Novels 13 Oskar K // Oskar K 14 Rikke Bakman Non-Fiction 14 Lone Frank 15 Jesper Juul // Niels Thorsen 16 Top 10 - Best selling Danish books in 2009 17 Recently sold 20 Books in brief
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By Mikkel Bruun Zangenberg, translated by John Mason Kaspar Colling Nielsen’s debut collection Mount København (‘Mount Copenhagen’) is made up of 17 short stories and explores the playful and bizarre consequences of a single counterfactual idea: What if the Danish state had worked with private investors over a 200-year period to create a 3,500 meter high mountain just outside of Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark? On the one hand, Colling Nielsen gives a sober account of the mental, geographical, climatic and economic effects of the project – a boom in tourism, the emergence of a sharp division between the middle class and upper class and the introduction of completely new species and plants. On the other hand, each of his stories entwines a spectacular fate with the mountain’s emergence; from Jan Peter Larsen who transforms himself into a bird-person and starts a global movement with students based in India, to the man called Flemming,
who gradually makes himself into a travelling magnet and ruins himself in the process. Colling Nielsen succeeds in binding this madcap idea with a series of specific fantasies to create absorbing stories. The premise is that Denmark is a welfare state deeply characterised by consensus and uniformity – even the country is flat, and this, according to Colling Nielsen’s narration, has prevented Danes from freeing themselves from a kind of stolid conformity. It follows that creating a mountain ought to be able to change this premise. Colling Nielsen maps out the consequences by adroitly pointing at the dystopian and utopian consequences of Mount Copenhagen. The stories typically end in catastrophe or ruin or with a happy and uplifting ending. The point is that the mountain in its own right can motivate people to do more to explore and seek out extremes, to move slightly away from the quagmire of compromise. The author is currently writing Mount Copenhagen as a TV series.
Kaspar Colling Nielsen / Photo: Jes Larsen
A madcap idea
Kaspar Colling Nielsen Mount København / Mount Copenhagen Gyldendal 2011, 176 pp. Foreign Rights Gyldendal Group Agency Sofie Voller Phone: + 45 33 75 57 74 sofie_voller@gyldendal groupagency.dk Film Rights Sold To Denmark
The dangerous dream of normality By May Schack, translated by Russell Dees Charlotte Weitze is a modern voice in the Danish tradition of magical realism. She employs symbolism and goes beyond reality as an imaginative means to manifest inner conflicts. Her eight tales are set in the White Quarter, a smart area outside Copenhagen where everyone can live out, accept or destroy themselves in their dreams of normality. Nearby social housing blocks threaten them with disorder. These two locations are separated by the marsh and the lake, places of untamed nature. A recurring theme is loneliness, the price we pay for respectability. In Havevandring (‘A Walk in the Garden’), an older man keeps his home and garden immaculate. He always has a paintbrush in his hand, and is constantly retouching things. His self-satisfied and empty life is derailed when a down-and-out single mother and her many children park their trailer in his front garden. The young hairdresser Jane is a character who fears life in Vist gør det ondt (‘Sure, It Might Hurt’). She lives
with her sick friend, a reflection of her own crippled state and goes about in a daze until her friend dies. Her awakening is painful, but that is the nature of real life in contrast to her past trance like existence. To apply a purely psychological interpretation to these beautifully written tales would rob them of the ambiguity and magic that Weitze so brilliantly captures on paper. Her skill is particularly apparent in two tales that explore the devastating impact of a new baby on its parents. In a story entitled Hvad gør en fugl? (‘What Does a Bird Do?’), the father, an oboist, can no longer play his superb instrument which loses its purity of tone after the baby is born A child is also a problem in the grim tale ‘Lupus’ about a couple where the husband is oblivious to his child because of his obsession with a lupine dog in the marsh. The dog comes close to devouring them all; the animal symbolises the destructive forces in mankind that refuse to be tamed in the White Quarter where deep divisions are hidden behind neatly painted facades.
Charlotte Weitze / Photo: Robin Skjoldborg
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Charlotte Weitze Det hvide kvarter / The White Quarter Samleren 2011, 154 pp. Foreign Rights Gyldendal Group Agency Sofie Voller Phone: + 45 33 75 57 74 sofie_voller@gyldendal groupagency.dk Previous Titles Translated Into Finnish
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Christina Hesselholdt / Photo: Robin Skjoldborg
Friends reunite By Lise Garsdal, translated by John Mason
Christina Hesselholdt Camilla – og resten af selskabet
Camilla – og resten af selskabet (‘Camilla – and company’) is a continuation of ‘Camilla and the Horse’ from 2008, but the text, or the circle of narrative, is arranged tightly around six voices and can be read on its own. The prose piece is about a group of middleaged friends and the relationships between them. A sickbed – Camilla’s husband Charles is bedridden with a bad back – comes to symbolise the exhaustion that marks them all, both physically and mentally. Death is getting closer, as death does. Or as one of the characters says: “I started turning grey a long time ago.” The text is an ebb and flow of moods and memories and existence, in which the circle of friends is allowed to make contributions in turn. But at its heart lies Camilla, recalling her youthful belief in the seductive power of a white summer dress, or who experiences loneliness par excellence when she spends the night alone in an unknown hotel in an unknown town.
/ Camilla – and the Rest of the Company Rosinante 2011, 139 pp. Foreign Rights Gyldendal Group Agency Sofie Voller Phone: + 45 33 75 57 74 sofie_voller@gyldendalgroupagency.dk Previous Titles Sold To England, France, Norway, Serbia, Spain, Sweden | NOVELS |
Anonymity and foreignness appear here as physical and abstract entities in an inner dialogue of an intellectual and emotionally intelligent but totally confused woman. Her friend turns up and pragmatically saves her from the existential misconception with the frank line: “I am Camilla’s GPS.” Christina Hesselholdt’s plotless prose embraces life’s big dramas and the subsequent smallest change in the situation’s mood. When in one of the other chapters Camilla follows in the historical footsteps of Sylvia Plath and Virginia Wolf, it does not come across as artificial but rather as a natural – and entertaining – gesture of recognition to two writers to whom Hesselholdt’s satisfying and graceful prose must be said to be related. The Camilla books seem most like a series of thoughtful and soliloquising essays – in some of the most stylistically beautiful prose currently being written in Denmark.
The island under heaven
Hans Henrik Møller
By Klaus Rothstein, translated by Russell Dees
Hans Henrik Møller Burgundia / Burgundia Forlaget Hovedland 2011, Foreign Rights Forlaget Hovedland Phone:+45 86 27 65 00 mail@hovedland.dk
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Hans Henrik Møller’s Burgundia (The Latin name for the Baltic island of Bornholm) is a successful execution of an ambitious project to tell the stories of two families and to describe the mythology of Bornholm from the distant past until the present day in a great sweep of stories and tall tales. While some passages resemble powerful reporting from real, historical events (for example, the spring tide of 1872 or the Russian bombardment in the days around the liberation from Nazi occupation in May 1945), others are pure fiction – for example, the shipwreck that opens the novel and the grounding of a Russian ship with a Chinese crew. It is up to the reader to discover what is real and what is pure imagination. Everything is connected with topographic zeal. Hans Henrik Møller may have had the same idea with Bornholm and Burgundia that James Joyce had with Dublin
and Ulysses. If the city disappeared, it could be rebuilt on the basis of the novel. Burgundia is thus unique in Danish literature – perhaps, the most Bornholmian novel ever written? Hans Henrik Møller’s novel is reminiscent of other great Danish prose in recent years that often takes its starting point in a hometown – for example, Thorstein Thomsen’s superb Sne på hendes ansigt (‘Snow on Her Face’), and it is obvious to compare it to the internationally-renowned island-and-sea novel by Carsten Jensen about the island of Ærø, Vi, de druknede (‘We, the Drowned’). Burgundia can – and should – be read as a family chronicle about an island under heaven, as a collection of folklore and tall tales with massive footnotes of encyclopaedic knowledge – or as an awe-inspiring and lush literary fantasy about Bornholm as a mythical and mystical place, geographically and mentally.
Lone Aburas / Photo: Morten Holtum
Lisbeth Brun / Photo: Morten Holtum
The Tyranny of silence
Modern living
By Marie Louise Kjølbye, translated by Russell Dees
By Lise Garsdal, translated by John Mason
Lisbeth Brun’s new novel Det du mister (‘The Things You Lose’) describes the power of silence in the bad old days when words and emotions were considered superfluous luxuries. The novel is set in an unsentimental region of northern Jutland near Løgstør in the years 1961-88. However, nothing much has changed from the previous century. Hard work is the characters’ passport to the few pleasures they allow themselves. Everyone is too busy working to realise that hard graft alone is no longer enough. One by one, the old family farms go bankrupt and are absorbed into giant pig farms. The book’s protagonist is the gifted, melancholy Marie, who gets pregnant and marries a farmer, Villy, who makes her give up her child. He refuses to talk about this or anything else over the next twenty years. When Marie attempts to communicate with her husband, his nose is usually buried in a farmer’s gazette. His voice is distant and remote, his mind on the adverts for secondhand machinery. Brun writes dialogue as you would expect to hear it, only she is even funnier. The characters consistently say the opposite of what they mean, while the narrator’s unobtrusive humour reveals what is really going on and paints the grey-toned universe with all the colours of the rainbow. The book’s transparent realism puts the stark nature of the Jutland peninsula on the map, where weather and nature determine the attitudes of the inhabitants. The landscape is grey and cold, soaking wet or yellow and dusty when Marie goes for bike rides to escape the constant odour of musty saddles and the noise from her son’s motocross racing in the hills. But the clouds over the Limfjord, her friendship with the librarian Anne, and brief, erotic encounters with a man she falls in love with, slowly open up her senses to the fact that life contains more than the tyranny of silence. ‘The Things You Lose’ is a rich novel about the courage to do what is necessary and to live with what cannot be changed.
It is not for nothing that Lone Aburas mentions her Norwegian colleague, Erlend Loe, in the reading guide that accompanies Den svære toer (‘The difficult number two’), a novel about Danes living in a commune. The naïvistic lines with which the characters are drawn and the unintentional humour attributed to them is a style Loe and Aburas have in common. We are dealing with a group of ordinary people who do not make a big deal about themselves but in their own little clumsy way insist on their fair share of the cake. To a greater or lesser extent, the characters are all associated with a dog training course (!) in the Greater Copenhagen area, and their fates are intertwined over a brief but for them eventful period. Relationships come into being and fall apart, families break up, while new ones may become established. All because of something that could be called the random accident principle: “Oops. I was unfaithful”, “Ouch. I moved out by mistake but don’t actually want to get a divorce”, which gives this portrayal of the modern domicile a tinge of tragic-comedy. At the same time, we see the novel’s characters at work, where contemporary clichés about management and public services are subjected to the same form of ridicule, and we get the impression that perhaps in reality this is a critique of our time. By exploiting the collective novel as a genre, Lone Aburas further supports the novel’s engagement with society and at the same time makes it part of a Scandinavian trend. This slightly outdated genre with its political undertones is clearly a hit with a new generation of writers, including its two best-known Norwegian counterparts, Gunnhild Øyehaug, (‘Vente, blinke’) and Gertrude Marstein (‘Weekend’). This communal, democratic form, where many characters get to speak, can more or less be read as a conscious commentary about the age of individualism and the introverted, autobiographical “I” literature that comes with it. Lone Aburas holds up her figures of late modernity for cheerful critical examination but does not neglect to point out the equally ridiculous absurdities in the late modern society surrounding them.
Lisbeth Brun Det du mister / The Things You Lose Gyldendal 2011, 292 pp. Foreign Rights Gyldendal Group Agency Sofie Voller Phone: + 45 33 75 57 74 sofie_voller@gyldendal groupagency.dk Previous Titles Sold To Germany
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Lone Aburas Den svære toer / The difficult number two Gyldendal 2011, 170 pp. Foreign Rights Gyldendal Group Agency Sofie Voller Phone: + 45 33 75 57 74 sofie_voller@gyldendal groupagency.dk
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Morten Brask / Photo: Thomas Busk
Lone Hørslev / Photo: Thomas A
Everyday victims
Lone Hørslev Sorg og camping / Sorrow and Camping C&K Forlag 2011, 219 pp. Foreign Rights C&K Forlag Charlotte Jørgensen Phone: +45 30 60 04 29 charlotte@ckforlag.dk
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Morten Brask William Sidis’ perfekte liv / The Perfect Life of William Sidis Politikens Forlag 2011, 304 pp. Foreign Rights Politikens Forlag Nya Guldberg Phone: + 45 33 47 07 07 nya.guldberg@jppol.dk Previous titles sold to France Visit the website dedicated to William Sidis www.sidis.net
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The American dream child
By May Schack, translated by Russell Dees
By Lise Garsdal, translated by John Mason
Lone Hørslev’s novel, Sorg og camping (‘Sorrow and Camping’), is set in a small town called Løkke. The name is pronounced exactly like the Danish word ‘lykke’ which means happiness, deeply ironic given the lives of the very ordinary human beings we follow on a bitingly cold December day in 1985. While engaged in banal, everyday actions, the characters reflect on a camping trip they all shared. Their thoughts provide the novel with a unique tone where the past and present intertwine down to the level of the individual sentence. It has a comic effect when used to describe matter-of-factly and in great detail how cans of tomatoes are stacked in a shop, while the character’s mind makes a long journey back across deep frustrations and existential questions. In this novel, Lone Hørslev has found her true voice in contemporary Danish literature – effective, funny, ironic, wise. She writes simply and introduces surprising and precise images. Hørslev’s style can best be described tragicomic realism. An example of this is the married couple, Jørgen and Marianne, who run a small supermarket. Jørgen secretly worries that the big chains “are eating their customers like a predator that can’t get enough”. Marianne does not voice her frustrations either. She had a one-night stand with her husband’s friend, Laurits, who called her a panther. The same name Laurits uses for supermarket employee Jannie with whom he has a long-standing affair. The reader, now attuned to Hørslev’s gallows humours realises that Laurits also applies this term to his wife. Another example is Jørgen’s brother, Thomas, who wants to be a writer and only went on the camping trip in order to get material for his novel. He is married to an Icelandic woman Gunnhildur, who has been away for a couple of days, and is in the process of leaving him. It all comes to a head one December evening when everyone meets up at a party at Jørgen and Marianne’s and Thomas liberates the family cat, which has accidentally been locked in the attic – like a mad woman. All this angst-ridden material may sound familiar, but written with Lone Hørslev’s pen it is elevated to great humour with enormous substance. Even the title, ‘Sorrow and Camping’ shows what happens when different semantic domains are overlaid. Under the revealing and merciful light of the tragicomic, everything can be seen from new and different perspectives.
Morten Brask’s literary fantasy about the sorry fate of American child prodigy William Sidis has everything that historical fiction requires: an exceptional personal history, a distinctive period in world history and an ethical discussion that stretches beyond its time into our own: the contemporary discussion about raising children and their education. We follow William Sidis (1898-1944) through three phases – childhood, youth and his last years as an adult, flitting between them so that events in his adulthood clearly reflect events from his earlier life. As an only child to two gifted Russian émigrés, each with slightly different ambitions for their son and his life, William is provided with an exclusive stimulation of his intellect and becomes a fluent reader of Latin as a child and is accepted into Harvard at the age of 11. His professor father enthusiastically explains his method to the popular press, who, scenting a sensation, are following the shy boy’s career: the boy should from the moment of his birth only be stimulated in logic and deductive skills and not waste any time on “unnecessary games” like “ball games and running games” is the recipe from the paternal professor. The parents’ method can scarcely be said to support what is known in today’s terminology as social intelligence, so William, already lonely because of his high intellect, becomes further isolated because of his upbringing. In scene after scene, Morten Brask conjures a dysfunctional family whose material prosperity increases in proportion to the weakening of its ability to cohere. William’s insecurity in social settings in his childhood and adulthood has fatal consequence; the bullying he experiences in childhood continues into his adult life, but now with increased intensity and political undertones. The family’s Jewish background and William’s flirtation with socialism does not make his life any easier in the century of world wars and revolutions. Despite these problems, the author allows William to experience the loyalty of friendship and love through the upper class girl, Martha, and through his drunken Harvard friend, Sharfman. The author uses these two characters to get behind the sensational and ungainly figure of William and reveal a human being and a man. The historical William Sidis was said to prefer a life of anonymity – Morten Brask gently and respectfully breaks down this anonymity.
Johannes Ewald
Simon Glinvad
Between abyss and sea of joy
Three Great Danes
By Liselotte Wiemer, translated by John Mason
By Thomas Bredsdorff, translated by Russell Dees
Simon Glinvad’s new short story collection is childhood unplugged. The small, fatal shifts between knowledge and powerlessness, loss and reconciliation. “So most things changed without really changing much at all.” This single sentence from Simon Glinvad’s short story collection Krager i træet (‘Crows in the Tree’) fundamentally captures childhood’s turbulent sea. All those unexceptional shifts between insight and powerlessness, loss and reconciliation. All of those shifts between the known and the unknown land, which seem overwhelming at the time but afterwards are nothing but a little ripple - and then the day continues on its way. And this is where Simon Glinvad’s strength lies. He can condense a rupture so that you hardly feel it. He can let people tremble like a leaf in the wind without intervening distractingly. Because he trusts in life’s own flow. As in the intimate portrayal of the desolate father dropping his son off at the house where the son’s mother lives with her new man. “Sometimes you just have to get through the day,” the father says out loud. “Even though you doubt you’ll make it, you usually make it anyway. And at night when you look back, you can barely understand what felt so difficult. There is nothing finer than a good day you haven’t ruined for yourself.” The last sentence is carved from a piece of the eternal tree! In this fashion, each story follows a central figure. There is the old woman on the farm, the 32-year-old daughter, the old major with dementia. Nine stories in all. The fragile father-son relationship comes though strongest. Cast in different stories but made of the same element. A father who is at once remote yet represents the centre of life. Because unrealistically, he will not give up on the dream of happiness. A father who can play and talk to you as an equal. But also a father who in a split second turns into a loser. And capsizes. Each of the short stories in this collection is like this. Full of bubbles that disappear. Crows that flap and struggle upwards. Dreams that die. And in the middle of it all, a sea of joy.
Johannes Ewald (1743-1781) was the first full-time poet in Danish literature – as a writer, he had no other source of income than poetry. When, as a young man, he submitted a manuscript to the Danish Academy and was told to correct certain imperfections, he withdrew the manuscript and decided to find for himself the rules he would follow. He was the first full-blooded individualist. Ewald wanted to be the best – on his own terms. And he was. Many of us consider him to be the greatest poet to write in Danish. Nevertheless he had to make a living and he decided to write poetry on commission to celebrate weddings and other red-letter days for royal and haut-bourgeois families. At that point in the 1700s there was not yet a market for poetry. Consequently many of Ewald’s best poems were written for his desk drawer and not published until after his death. This was also true of his unfinished prose work, Levned & Meninger (‘Life and Opinions’). He took the title from Lawrence Sterne’s ‘Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy’ and inspiration from the same author’s ‘Sentimental Journey’, but the result was original. Like Sterne, Ewald wrote playful prose with shifts in tempo and register from humour to pathos in a way that had never been seen before. However, unlike Sterne’s writings, Ewald’s autobiographical journey contains a painful core that holds the work together. As a young man, he fell in love with a slightly older woman, Arendse, who soon married another. Unrequited love is one of the universal themes of poetry, but it has rarely been expressed with such linguistic power and emotional command as in Ewald’s ‘Life and Opinions’.
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Simon Glinvad Krager i træet / Crows in the Tree Rosenkilde & Bahnhof, 2011, 240 pp. Foreign Rights Leonhardt & Høier Literary Agency A/S Monica Gram monica@leonhardt-hoier.dk Tel.: +45 33 13 25 23 Mobile: +45 26 71 60 42
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Johannes Ewald Levned og Meninger / Life and Opinions Foreign Rights Det danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab www.dsl.dk jgn@dsl.dk Previous Titles Translated Into Norwegian
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Three Great Danes - - Pontoppidan
Henrik Pontoppidan
By Thomas Bredsdorff, translated by Russell Dees
Henrik Pontoppidan Lykke Per / Lucky Per Foreign Rights Det danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab www.dsl.dk jgn@dsl.dk
Henrik Pontoppidan (1857-1943) is one of only three Danish writers to receive a Nobel Prize for Literature. His short stories and novels paint a broad and multifaceted picture of the Danish nation and the Danish mind during its transition from an agrarian society ruled by an absolute monarch to a modern, democratic, urban and industrial country. One of his three major novels is Lykke-Per (‘Lucky Per’), which was published in eight volumes in the years around 1900 and collected into one abridged volume in 1905. The eponymous hero, Per Sidenius, grows up in a parsonage in the country. He breaks with the family ideology to study engineering in Copenhagen. Per becomes a modern man, he falls in love with a Jewish woman, whose wealthy parents can very conveniently support Per’s grandiose plans for harbour constructions and wave energy.
But becoming a modern man proves to be a struggle. His spiritual heritage from the parsonage leads to a break with his Jewish girlfriend. Per settles down in the provinces, marries a woman there who, like himself, grew up in a parsonage, and has three children with her. An encounter with a Kierkegaard fanatic makes him abandon Christianity for a second time – plus wife and children – in order to become a hermit, living off a modest job as an assistant road engineer. In return, he experiences the happiness “of becoming fully and consciously his own self”. Socially, ‘Lucky Per’ is a story of rise and fall. Mentally, it is a journey towards liberation. The title, which Pontoppidan took from Hans Christian Andersen, is to be understood literally. Per becomes lucky – at a high price.
Previous Titles Translated Into Czech, English, French, German,
Three Great Danes
Hungarian, Lithuanian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish
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- - Nordbrandt
Henrik Nordbrandt / Photo: Lisbeth Thorlacius
By Thomas Bredsdorff, translated by Russell Dees
Henrik Nordbrandt Håndens skælven i November / The Trembling of the Hand in November Foreign Rights Gyldendal Group Agency Sofie Voller Phone: + 45 33 75 57 74 sofie_voller@gyldendalgroupagency.dk Previous Titles Translated Into Bulgarian, Dutch, English, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish
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Henrik Nordbrandt (born 1945) is a major Danish poet. Since his debut in 1966, he has published nearly 30 collections of poems, all highly regarded. There is much to choose from to acquaint non Danish readers with this poet’s distinctive way of writing which is characterised by the ability to invent paradoxical metaphors: images that apparently dissolve in contradictions but, on closer examination, prove to live by virtue of those same contradictions. If anyone were to take on the nigh impossible task of translating Nordbrandt’s poetry, his 1986 anthology, Håndens skælven i november (‘The Trembling of the Hand in November’) is a good choice as it consists of 91 fourline poems. It should be possible to translate at least some of them. One poem in particular has become a national favourite. When Henrik Nordbrandt received an award, a
cynical TV station wanted to show that awards never go to popular authors (writers of crime novels) but to esoteric poets nobody has heard of. The reporter, therefore, asked a woman in the street if she knew who Henrik Nordbrandt was. ‘Isn’t he the one,’ the woman replied, ‘who wrote: “Året har 16 måneder: November, december, januar, februar, marts, april, maj, juni, juli, august, september, oktober, november, november, november, november” (“The year has 16 months: November, December, January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, November, November, November”)?’ Nordbrandt has captured succinctly and memorably a particular quality about his homeland, the weather and the light during the penultimate month of the year. He has described love, death, happiness and loss just as concisely.
René Jean Jensen / Photo: Lars Svankjær
Søren Ulrik Thomsen / Photo: Morten Holtum
All these poems about death and memory
What we plan and what we do
By Thomas Bredsdorff, translated by John Mason
By Kamilla Löfström, translated by John Mason
Søren Ulrik Thomsen (1956) is a difficult and not very prolific poet. Nine years ago he published his seventh collection, in 2011 his eighth Rystet spejl (‘Shaken Mirror’). Many of the poems in the collection have a melancholy voice. Time passes, quickly, slowly and sometimes backwards. In one poem young children dream of their past, “which is wide and dark”. Even the old feel they are lost when they look out on “communal areas”, a term instantly recognisable to every Dane, conjuring images of parks, concrete, and noisy children running between the blocks of flats. What happens when the old see these playground children? They “suddenly remember / that they have lost their parents”. Søren Ulrik Thomsen has an empathic way of writing and experiencing. He doesn’t just plaster his world with his own emotions; he experiences other people’s feelings through his imagination. These simulated experiences – of child, of poet, of the aged – cause time to flicker. Many of the poems are about death. One poem describes a visit to a cemetery in a foreign town on the birthday of the deceased; with the fine reason that, “even now there is a place in the world / where you are not”. In the poem printed here, you can see another example of how this poet circles around death and life after it. (See extract in the web-edition). But it is also important to be reminded that there are also happy experiences and good humour hidden in this rich collection of poetry. As it says: “Among all these poems / about death and memory / space has been found for 11 lines / about the dandelions / whose light I had forgotten again this year / turned on all at once like a funfair”
The poetry collection Jeg har planlagt at dagdrømme (‘I have planned to daydream’) is the first poetry collection by a writer with years of experience as a critic, editor and translator. René Jean Jensen (b. 1971) has translated writers such as Robert Walser and Helene Hegemann into Danish. The title ‘I have planned to daydream’ is a typical example of the writer on the edge of a paradox. It is difficult to be deliberately and consciously absent-minded, but the expression only approximates a paradox, if we understand it in such a way that the planning takes place before the dreaming and therefore is temporally dissociated from it. Or the title might allude to the dream solely having been planned but never executed. Perhaps because it turned to be impossible. One could claim that the very finest thing about this poetry collection is that the poet seems to have succeeded in writing in that flowing border between conscious and unconscious. Between the planned and the spontaneous. This results in talking, thinking poetry that simultaneously has lightness about it and language that has a playful tone. The poems are grouped into three roughly equal sections. ‘Short stay’, ‘Principal exposed’ and ‘Is someone sitting here?’ They are concerned with what can be felt, such as a bump in the tablecloth or a realisation that “There are fixed places/on my foot where I never feel the shoe pinch”. The Danish idiom “where you feel the shoe pinch”, meaning to feel where a problem is, dissolves into words about a specific foot and a specific shoe, and so the imagery loses its figurative meaning. From one perspective life appears very simple, for example in these lines from the poem “To win is to have won”: “You learn slowly to distinguish the world’s two categories:/ things with handles and things without. Things you can carry outside of sight/ and things that remain standing or come closer.” But it is precisely the unease, chaos and awareness of death, which makes the ‘I’ of the poems to strive after this simplicity.
Søren Ulrik Thomsen Rystet spejl / Shaken Mirror Gyldendal 2011, 55 pp. Foreign Rights Gyldendal Group Agency Sofie Voller Phone: + 45 33 75 57 74 sofie_voller@gyldendal groupagency.dk Previous Translated Into English, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish
| POETRY |
René Jean Jensen Jeg har planlagt at dagdrømme / I have planned to daydream Gyldendal 2011, 97 pp. Foreign Rights Gyldendal Group Agency Sofie Voller Phone: + 45 33 75 57 74 sofie_voller@gyldendal groupagency.dk
| POETRY |
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Lene Kaaberbøl / Photo: Sanne Berg
Ida Jessen / Photo: Miklos Szabo
Ida Jessen and Hanne Bartholin Carl / Carl Høst & Søn 2010, 36 pp.
An elephantastic meeting
Cat owners have more fun
Foreign Rights Rosinante & Co.
By Kamilla Löfström, translated by John Mason
By Kamilla Löfström, translated by John Mason
This classic and simply told story for small children begins: ‘At last it was Carl’s turn to visit Grandmother all alone’. Simple prose, where each word counts: ‘At last’, so we know Carl has been waiting for this day, and ‘all alone’ tells us that Carl isn’t that big yet and maybe he had to summon up courage – and that he loves his Grandmother and wants her to himself. And the accompanying illustrations are equally simple, Carl’s family waving goodbye on one side and on the other Carl and his Grandmother on the stone steps with a suitcase. But notice what Hanne Bartholin has chosen not to draw. Grandmother’s garden is represented only by simple, almost uniform flowers. Grandmother’s house is not shown. All we see is a stairway and a door opening. The rest we have to imagine for ourselves. On the next page Grandmother’s living room is simply a shelf with a teapot, a little flowerpot, a vase, a teacup and a torch – all elements that are repeated on the next pages. The book’s simplicity provides both room for children’s imagination and quiet for their thoughts. Carl thinks he will have Grandmother to himself, but Mr Grey also wants to visit Grandmother. ‘Oh,’ says Carl when he realises Grandmother has a visitor. But Mr Gray has brought his grandchild Fanny, whom, it turns out, Carl met earlier in the day in the supermarket, behind a mountain of strawberries. ‘It’s good you came,’ Carl has to say to Fanny. And that it was.
The story gets off to a blistering start from the very first page, when Clara is attacked in her own safe home by a mysterious black cat, and 150 pages and a trial by fire later, Clara is a brave wild witch – accepted by a group of adult wild witches, with knowledge of a world that is much more dangerous than the world she knew in her previous everyday life, with an ordinary mother and an ordinary school. Until she was 12 years old, Clara knew nothing about wild witches or her aunty Isa’s wild witch life. But now Clara is about to leave childhood behind, she cannot hide the fact that she is a wild witch with special strong powers. Powers so strong that another wild witch, Chimera, sees Clara as a threat and tries to get rid of her. Wild witches have special relationships with animals. They help animals, and animals help them. A real wild witch can summon a mouse, or, if you are just a childwitch, one day you might find a little mouse sitting in your pencil case at school, because it needs help getting a thorn out of its nose. This is how Lene Kaaberbøl lets the world of the familiar and the world of wild witches’ meet. At the end of the book, it appears as though all Clara has done is spend a vacation at her aunt’s house and come home with a cat. But there is something special about cats, because if anything it is they who own their owners (and wild witches!). Clara has got a cat and several friends in distress. She will need her friends, for she may have managed to get through the trial by fire, but Chimera with her huge wings has escaped – and she must be furious over the defeat she suffered against Clara. Ildprøven ‘(Trial by fire’) is the first book in the WILD WITCH series.
Anne Mørch-Hansen Phone: + 45 33 41 18 02 hsamh@rosinante-co.dk
| CHILDRENS BOOKS |
Lene Kaaberbøl Vildheks / Wildwitch Alvilda, 2011, 155 pp. Foreign Rights Lars Ringhof Agency Esthi Kunz esthi@ringhof.dk Sold to Norway (Samlaget) Sweden (Rabén & Sjögren) Previous titles published in Bulgaria, Estonia, Faroe Islands, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, Lithuania, Norway, Russia, Sweden, The Netherlands
| CHILDRENS BOOKS |
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Bent Haller / Photo: John G. Dinesen
My life as déjà vu By Kamilla Löfström, translated by John Mason Ham der søger Døden (‘The Boy Who Called on Death’) is a monstrous and violent story for young adults, which grapples with the big existential questions. What is the meaning of life? Does God exist? What happens when we die? What is time? How can we say something is real and something else is not real? Bent Haller’s story incorporates these questions and the great religions’ and mythologies’ conceptions of life and death. Dante’s Divine Comedy is also a major influence. The Boy Who Called on Death is a broadlybased metafiction with philosophical and religious perspectives, but it is based on a world every western teenager will recognise. Lau is 12 years old, his parents are divorced, his best friend is called Marcus, and he loves to play his computer game Route 66. One evening Lau is supposed to eat dinner with Marcus because his mother is working late. The family lives in suburbia – the same houses, same cars, same lives. That is the evening on which Lau experiences a pre-
monition that something is going to go wrong, and that he has experienced it all before. That his mother had already picked him up from Marcus’s house and they had had an accident on the motorway. From this point the novel goes on to become a fantastic sphere of metamorphosis, or the act of reading can be compared to an adventure game, as the reader moves through different settings and meets different creatures and creations. Lau meets Beatrice and together they meet Pathfinder, a true-to-form oracle, spouting only shadowy talk. Lau discovers that the universe he moves in is divided into houses. God lives in the sixth house, and Death is held prisoner in the seventh. He understands that if he is to escape the unbearable repetition of re-experiencing his 12-year-old life ending tragically on the motorway, he must call on Death. Lau’s déjà vu life can have an ending. As reader you get the feeling that it is a good and peaceful end.
Bent Haller Ham der søger døden / The Boy Who Called on Death Høst og Søn 2010, 329 pp. Foreign Rights Rosinante & Co. Anne Mørch-Hansen Phone: + 45 33 41 18 02 HSAMH@rosinante-co.dk Previous Titles Translated Into Dutch, Estonian, French, German, Swedish
| CHILDRENS BOOKS |
By Damian Arguimbau, translated by Barbara J. Haveland The tale of Robin Hood may be a story, but is it true anyway – is its meaning right? A truth we can stay true to, telling us that we can take from the rich to give to the poor? Robin Hood didn’t steal for himself. He took from those who had plenty and gave to those who had nothing. He fought injustice and he helped the weak. The main character in 2 kroner og 25 øre (‘A Tale of Twenty Pence’) is a 14-year-old boy who feels powerless when faced with poverty in Africa. His school teacher has passed out a brochure about starving children. “For twenty pence you can feed a child for one day – breakfast, lunch and dinner. For 20 pounds you can save the life of a severely malnourished child,” the brochure reads. The 14-year-old boy must have thought the ‘you’ the brochure was addressing was him. Whatever the reason, he takes very specific action. He decides to skip school every other day so that he can work in a supermarket to save money for the starving children. He starts to steal from the shops and sells his stolen loot to a crook. The boy puts all of the money in a special box for
starving children and asks his grandmother to look after it. He tells her the box holds a love letter and even though his grandmother knows otherwise she doesn’t say anything. She is the only adult who understands that her grandson cannot ignore the fact that in one part of the world there are people who have clothes and food galore while in another part of the world children die of hunger. The boy’s project expands. One day he decides to steal a refrigerated lorry full of food from the supermarket and drive it to Africa to give the food to those who need it. Naturally the task the boy has taken upon himself is impossible – even though he has got his girlfriend Anne with him in the lorry and they are in the mission together. With its very direct tone and slightly fragmentary form, A Tale of Twenty Pence sheds light on a very complex problem and on the anger and compassion it stirs in us. And does so, it must be noted, without dictating what is right and what is wrong.
Louis Jensen / Photo: Thomas Knoop
The art of perfection
Louis Jensen 2 kroner og 25 øre /
A Tale of Twenty Pence Gyldendal 2010, 160 pp. Foreign Rights Gyldendal Group Agency Sofie Voller Phone: + 45 33 75 57 74 sofie_voller@gyldendal groupagency.dk Sold to Germany - Carl Hanser Verlag Previous Titles Translated Into Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish
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Claes Johansen
(Illu her)
Resistance movement and lovers By Bo Tao Michaëlis, translated by Russell Dees
In late 1948, a 20-year-old Danish woman, Anita Gerholdt, arrives under an assumed name at Kastrup Airport, Copenhagen. She is not just another visitor. She has a history in the Danish resistance movement during the German occupation. The love of her life, the high profile resistance fighter Jens Christian, was tortured to death by the Germans’ despicable Danish henchmen during the last winter of the war. Now she returns home to a liberated but chaotic Denmark as an English secret agent to take part in a mission that includes both the past war against the Nazis and the present confrontation with the Communists. At the end of the Forties, the hot World War turns into a new and very Cold War. Yesterday’s friends are tomorrow’s enemies. The resistance times have left a legacy of resentments and a desire for revenge still to cool down more than three years after the end of the war. Anitas hjemkomst (‘Anita’s Homecoming’) is an original historical, political thriller – exciting, sinister,
Claes Johansen Anitas hjemkomst / Anita’s Homecoming Modtryk 2011, 227 pp. Foreign Rights Phone: + 45 87 31 76 00 forlaget@modtryk.dk Previous Titles Sold To United Kingdom
Michael Katz Krefeld / Photo: Steen Evald
| CRIME |
Michael Katz Krefeld Protokollen / The Protocol Lindhardt og Ringhof, 2011, 361 pp. Foreign Rights Lars Ringhof Agency Phone: +45 32 17 70 57 lr@ringhof.dk Previous Titles Sold To Germany, Norway, Sweden
| CRIME |
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realistic and noir in the tradition of the spy novels of Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, and John le Carré, with no rules but the law of the jungle; shoot first and every man for himself. At the same time it is a dark, atmospheric description of an occupied country’s ambivalent attitudes toward the occupying power which range from collaboration to resistance. Claes Johansen’s (anti)hero is clearly engaged in the national-conservative resistance that began the year before the more organised Communists intervened after Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. Anita and her friends and lovers are idealistic amateurs in waters teeming with dangerous freebooters, professional partisans and cynical agents. The novel is also an elegiac love story about starting over and finding a new love for a young woman who, due to tragic and fatal circumstances, has become wise beyond her years both too early and too late.
Terror bomb in Copenhagen By Bo Tao Michaëlis, translated by Russell Dees A bomb explodes with bloody consequences on a busy square in central Copenhagen. 23 people are killed in a trendy cafe. The bomb has been manufactured with fertilizer and this crude construction leaves the police and the authorities in no doubt: Islamic Terrorism has finally come to Copenhagen. Nicolaj Storm, a likeable family man and head of the Danish Anti Terrorism Squad, is assigned to the case – under pressure to apprehend the Muslim perpetrators responsible for this vile and brutal mass murder as quickly as possible. Soon he identifies a cell in a ghetto in north-west Copenhagen. Here, we meet Inspector Katrine Bergman, a feisty, tough and combative police officer, first encountered in Michael Katz Krefeld’s earlier thriller Pan’s Secret. At the start of Protokollen (‘The Protocol’), Katrine is in trouble. She has beaten up a loathsome paedophile and is about to be dismissed from the po-
lice and sent to prison. However, her detailed knowledge of the criminal underworld of north-west Copenhagen, home to many gangsters, quickly makes her useful to Storm. She gets deeply involved in the case and proves to be highly effective under cover in ways that are not always politically correct. She and her colleagues suspect that there are forces other than Islamic Terrorism behind this complicated case in which traumatised Danish soldiers are recruited into a variety of disturbing conspiracies, some with Nazi overtones. This well-written and pacy book leads the reader on to the final explanation of the title. This very contemporary coupling of grumpy tomboy Katrine Bergman with nice middle-class Nikolaj Storm is reminiscent of the partnership of Lisbeth Salander and Michael Blomquist in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy.
Ole Dalgaard og Dorte Karrebæk / Photo: Ron Williams
Concentration camps for children
Quantum theory on graphic novel form
By Mikkel Bruun Zangenberg, translated by John Mason
By Mikkel Bruun Zangenberg, translated by John Mason
The graphic novel Lejren (‘The Camp’) by Oscar K., alias Ole Dalgaard, and Dorte Karrebæk takes the form of a provocative and thought-provoking allegory about the way adults shape the territory of childhood for generations of innocent children. By combining references to the German concentration camps, asylum centres in contemporary Europe and summer holiday camps, the author and cartoon book artist create the story of eight children and their arrival and life in an unnamed camp. First we are told “Childhood Changes Everyone” and at the camp entrance hangs the sign “Love conquers everyone”, which refers in part to the sign at the gates of Auschwitz “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work Sets You Free”) and in part to the Latin saying “Love conquers everything”. In K. and Karrebæk’s rewording, the Latin saying takes on an ominous sound. The children are shaved in the camp, all their clothes removed, and they are dressed in suits and given numbers instead of names. They sleep in large barracks and eat wretched food. They are also forced to carry out work that resembles slave labour, all organised by adults who are represented as grotesque and sadistic clown-like figures. They are released at the end of their term, to be replaced by a new generation of children who are brought into the camp. The Camp is at once a classic critique of civilisation in the tradition of Rosseau’s Émile and a sharp political barb directed at contemporary European governments’ refugee policies. These two aspects are incorporated into what is primarily a scorching critique of what adults think of as the care, Bildung and upbringing of children, which in The Camp is actually the loathsome process of standardisation and pacification of children, preparing them for a life as obedient and disciplined citizens. Running underneath the violent and caricatured reality of ‘The Camp’, there is a utopian longing for a world that gives children much more freedom to shape themselves – and last but not least a world where refugees and immigrants are treated humanely and with dignity.
We know that James Joyce had already attempted to make Einstein’s theory of relativity into a literary work with Ulysses in 1922. But as far as is known, this is the first time someone has tried to make a graphic novel that plays with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Writer Oscar K. and comic book artist Teddy Kristiansen’s δx·δρ(x)≥h/4π eller Gensyn med Heisenberg (‘δx·δρ(x)≥h/4π or Reunion with Heisenberg’) is an ambitious and widely acclaimed attempt to show the visual and literary consequences of the German physicist’s uncertainty principle of quantum theory – whereby, to use everyday language, we cannot measure an atomic particle’s position and speed simultaneously. By providing a fictional preface supposedly written by quantum physicist Niels Bohr, K. and Kristiansen attempt to show what happens with the graphic novel and for the entire concept of plot, if we put aside our usual expectations about logical cause and effect and physical determinism. The experiment takes place on the island Presenca, south of the Azores, where the Icelandic Baugur Group set up a speculative economy linked to a lottery where chance and randomness rule, apart from the fact that the organisers systematically rob the trusting purchasers of lottery tickets. In this murky world we find the author and the surveyor, who like Borges, play chess with each other, whirling to and fro between alternative potential situations, in which they enter into relations with a variety of women and friends. We have a number of points of reference: the author turns 60 (the real author Oscar K. turned 60 in 2010), an earthquake takes place, we get the enclosed yellow pages of Icelandic poet Olaf Kárason Ljósvikingen’s autobiography about his wretched fate (a nod to Halldór Laxness, to whom the book is dedicated), there is a hotel, and an earthquake does take place. But all of these points of reference fluctuate and are unstable, cards are shuffled without warning, locations disappear, expand or shrink to a new point in space. We are left with a sensation of vertigo and puzzlement.
Oskar K & Teddy Kristiansen δx·δρ(x)≥h/4π eller Gensyn med Heisenberg / δx·δρ(x)≥h/4π or Reunion with Heisenberg Forlaget Fahrenheit 2011, 160 pp. Foreign Rights Forlaget Fahrenheit Phone: +45 - 26 36 68 76 fahrenheit@email.dk Previous Titles Sold To Sweden
| GRAPHIC NOVELS |
Oskar K & Dorte Karrebæk Lejren / The Camp Høst 2011, 80 pp. Foreign Rights Gyldendal Group Agency Sofie Voller Phone: + 45 33 75 57 74 sofie_voller@gyldendal groupagency.dk Previous Titles Sold To
‘The Camp’ received The Danish Arts Council’s first prize for illustrated books.
Sweden
| GRAPHIC NOVELS |
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Lone Frank / Photo: Robin Skjoldborg
Rikke Bakman
Through the eyes of a child
Rikke Bakman Glimt / Glimpse Forlaget Aben Maler 2011, 310 pp. Foreign Rights Forlaget Aben Maler info@abenmaler.dk Sold to Sweden
| GRAPHIC NOVELS |
Lone Frank Mit smukke genom / My Beautiful Genome Gyldendal 2010, 306 pp. Foreign Rights The Science Factory Phone: +44 (0)207 193 7296 peter@sciencefactory.co.uk Previous Titles Sold To United Kingdom Visit Lone Frank’s homepage
The beautiful genes of a woman of science
By Mikkel Bruun Zangenberg, translated by John Mason
By Stéphanie Surrugue, translated by Russell Dees
Rikke Bakman’s autobiographical graphic novel GLIMT (‘GLIMPSE’) describes a summer’s day in Denmark in the middle of the 1980s. Bakman was six years old at the time, and through this description of a single day we are given on the one hand a contemporary portrait of a typical Danish family and of everyday life in a Scandinavian welfare state, and on the other a view of a world as being alternately safe and dangerous presented to us with loyalty and precision through the eyes of a child. Six-year-old Bakman is on holiday in North Jutland by the North Sea and lives in a holiday home with her parents and older sister. During this one day nothing much seems to happen – and yet so much does: a budgie has flown away and attempts to trap it are unsuccessful; Rikke manages to open a car door during a drive with her father and tumbles out onto the verge, though luckily is unscathed; the two sisters fight but make up; guests visit the parents in the evening, a minor drama of jealousy arises, but the situation is resolved; the little girl Rikke sees a young couple having sex on the beach, and so on. In a purely technical way Bakman lets each page form a single tableau, a single scene. By making perspectives and proportions deliberately naïve and childish, and by using pencil and crayon in such a way that we can see crossings-out and small changes – Bakman succeeds surprisingly effectively in creating a story that is both gripping and sophisticated while remaining consistently true to a child’s perspective. As a historical portrait of what real life was like in Denmark in the 1980s GLIMPSE is also precise. We hear the language, jargon and idioms of the time precisely reproduced. And we are given a portrayal of a way of life that is no longer permissible in the middle class of our time: the children eat sweets and sugar in large quantities, their father smokes and drinks beer, children and adults drive cars without seat belts, etc. All these many small changes are exposed and together show the significant changes western societies have undergone in the last 25 years.
In the search for greater self-knowledge, some people resort to therapy, others to Tarot cards or even tea leaves. Others seek answers in science. But very few go as far as Lone Frank: The 44-year-old neurobiologist and science writer has had her genes mapped, turned herself into a genetic guinea pig and described the search for herself in her fifth, highly-commended book, Mit smukke genom - historier fra genetikkens overdrev (‘My Beautiful Genome – Stories from the Frontier of Genetics’). In the name of science and curiosity, she submits herself to virtually every test you can find – consider: what if DNA is the new millennium’s path to self-enlightenment? Imagine if you could take your genetic horoscope in hand and learn more about yourself, your strengths and weaknesses? Lone Frank embarks on an almost novel-like bioexistential voyage of self-discovery in which, taking her own grim personal family history as her starting point, she engages in distinguished science journalism from the boundaries of international gene research. She interviews a wide range of the world’s leading geneticists, provides blood samples, saliva samples, and tissue samples to all manner of gene researchers, participates in studies and experiments and, finally, gets her genes mapped – a map that is now accessible on the Web. And throughout the whole tale, Lone Frank shares her personal and ethical considerations, as she waits for some test results in almost giddy anticipation and for others with such anxiety it makes her ill. For in the thousands of years of DNA that stream through Lone Frank, she may – perhaps – discover whether she has inherited some of the psychological illnesses that have appeared on both sides of her family. And the story of this Danish woman of science has a universal appeal, because, as a reader, you inevitably end up reflecting on your own origins, genetic baggage and, perhaps, come to see your own heritage and environment (and, possibly, your own children) in a whole new light; not necessarily a soft and flattering light, but clearer.
http://lonefrank.dk
| NON FICTION |
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Nils Thorsen / Photo: Jens Dresling
Jesper Juul / Photo: Vanja Vucovic
The new family
Lars von Trier: An original visual genius
By Per Schultz-Jørgensen, translated by John Mason
By Christian Monggaard, translated by John Mason
Bonusforældre – muligheder og faldgruber (‘Bonus Parents opportunities and pitfalls’) is about families that have gone through divorce and in which the divorced parents go on to find new partners and start a new family. Where they were previously referred to as step-parent families, today we use expression such as the “non-nuclear” or the “New Family”, with “your kids”, “my kids”, “our kids” or some even more complicated family constellation. The author emphasises that in these new families there are social and existential choices, which have to be tackled with care. There are lots of opportunities – and major pitfalls. The adults face a situation where they might have to live in a kind of competitive relationship with their partner’s child – or must adjust to the wishes of the partner’s ex. There can be challenges that create new lives – or an endless series of disappointments. The book aims to give a series of suggestions as to how the challenges can be turned into “bonus” and thereby into opportunities for growth for all of the family members. The book’s 10 chapters look at a particular important theme affecting the new family. For example, timing: when should the couple move in together – and what about the child who is still grieving over the old family set-up? Other important themes are friendship between a child and an adult, the question of being “number two on the partner’s hit list” and what to do if it all fails. There is also the theme of the bonus-parent’s involvement and responsibility. One of the book’s important points is involving children by inviting them into the decision-making process, thus allowing them to express their thoughts and feelings. A child has to be ready to give the new adult the gift it is to be their friend, someone with whom they are prepared to share attention, closeness, love and time. Another point is that the new adult has to make his or her presence felt in the new family and be themselves – for better or for worse. The book gives lots of proposals to tackle both practical and psychological problems. So the book is a guide to reflective parenthood, even to when this requires that an adult takes second place.
Lars von Trier is a difficult man to get to grips with. The Danish filmmaker is a complex person, who paradoxically hides behind a facade of apparently endless openness. He is intelligent and sharp; a man who does not tolerate stupid questions, who refuses to explain himself or his films, which include Breaking the Waves (1996), the Dogma film The Idiots (1998), Golden Palm winner Dancer in the Dark (2000), Dogville (2003), Antichrist (2009) and the forthcoming Melancholia (2011), which according to Trier, is a psychological disaster film. One thing everyone can agree on is that Lars von Trier is an original visual genius – the most important Danish film director since Carl Th. Dreyer – a man who sets himself fresh challenges artistically with every film he makes, as he challenges his audience emotionally and psychologically. You can read much more about this in journalist Nils Thorsen’s exciting new book, Geniet – Lars von Triers liv, film og fobier (‘Genius – Lars von Trier’s life, films and phobias’), which gets very close to Trier. Among other things, the author makes it abundantly clear that the film director struggles with depression and violent phobias. Over the course of a year Thorsen has spent many hours with Trier, and he attempts to paint a complete picture of a man who had an unusual childhood with considerable mother difficulties; a film director and a joker who loves to provoke and stir up strong emotions in other people. Thorsen is a good narrator and both he and the eloquent Trier enthusiastically cover the film director’s life and career while they spar with words and give each other a verbal going-over. Irony is Trier’s most important weapon, and there is never a dull moment when he talks about his crippling illness, his daemons, the origins of his individual films and encounters with exciting actors and film people, he has met through his work. Thorsen has spoken with Trier experts, the film director’s friends and colleagues and last but not least, his wife and older brother, people who have otherwise rarely expressed themselves on the subject of Trier. Thanks to them we are able to place further pieces together in the puzzle that is Lars von Trier, who tries his best in the book to undermine his own honesty and candour. Naturally.
Jesper Juul Bonusforældre / Bonus Parents Forlaget Apostrof 2010, 126 pp. Foreign Rights Leonhardt & Høier Phone: +45 33 13 25 23 anneli@leonhardt-hoier.dk Previous Titles Sold To Estonia, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden, The Netherlands
| NON FICTION |
Nils Thorsen Geniet / Genius – Lars von Trier’s life, films and phobias Politiken 2011, 397 pp. Foreign Rights Nya Gyldberg Phone: + 45 33 47 07 07 nya.guldberg@jppol.dk
| NON FICTION |
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Top 10 Best-selling Danish Books October 2010 to March 2011
Crime
Fiction Peter Høeg Elefantpasserens børn | Rosinante&Co. Anne Lise Marstrand-Jørgensen Hildegard bd. 2 | Gyldendal Hanne Reintoft Når dagene strenges | People’s Press Anne Lise Marstrand-Jørgensen Hildegard bd. 1 | Gyldendal Jakob Ejersbo Eksil | Gyldendal Morten Ramsland Sumobrødre | Gyldendal Jens Christian Grøndahl Det gør du ikke | C&K Forlag Henrik Nordbrandt Vi danskere | Brødrene Brøndum Jakob Ejersbo Revolution | Gyldendal Bjarne Reuter Den egyptiske tenor | Gyldendal
Non-Fiction
Jussi Adler-Olsen Journal 64; Afdeling Q | JP/Politikens Hus Sara Blædel Dødsengelen | People’s Press Leif Davidsen Min broders vogter | Lindhardt og Ringhof Hanne Bech Hansen Lasten | Lindhardt og Ringhof Jeanette Øbro Gerlow Skrig under vand | JP/Politiken Lotte Hammer & Søren Hammer Alting har sin pris | Gyldendal J.A. Kazinski Den sidste gode mand | JP/Politikens Hus Julie Hastrup Det blinde punkt | Rosinante & Co. Jens Henrik Jensen Spøgelsesfanger | JP/Politikens Hus Lene Kaaberbøl Kadaverdoktoren | Modtryk
Childrens Books Gunnar Nyborg De små synger | Rosinante Halfdan Rasmussen Halfdans ACB | Lindhardt og Ringhof Sigurd Barrett Sigurd fortæller bibelhistorier | JP/Politikens Hus Kenneth Bøgh Andersen Djævelens lærling | Rosinante Martin Keller og Ketil Theisen Hvad? Hvordan? Hvorfor? | JP/Politikens Hus Lene Kaaberbøl Vildheks – Ildprøven | Alvilda Ole Lund Kierkegaard Mig og bedstefar- og så Nisse Pok | Gyldendal Kenneth Bøgh Andersen Dødens terning | Rosinante Manu Sareen Hvad fætter gør, er altid det rigtige | JP/Politikens Hus Kenneth Bøgh Andersen Den forkerte død | Rosinante
Tom Buk-Swienty Dommedag Als | Gyldendal Claus Meyer Almanak | Lindhardt og Ringhof Adam Price og James Price Spise med Price, sæson 2 | Lindhardt og Ringhof Bjarne Riis Riis | People’s Press Claus Meyer Meyers bageri | Lindhardt og Ringhof Jane Aamund Dengang det var sjovt | People’s Press Bjarne Schilling & Gorm Vølver Håndbog for halvgamle mænd | JP/Politiken Claus Meyer Claus Meyers salatværksted | Lindhardt og Ringhof Flemming Rose Tavshedens tyranni | JP/Politikens Hus Stephanie Surrugue Enegænger – Portræt af en prins | JP/Politikens Hus
The lists are based on data provided by BookScan.dk. (Statistics for books with a recommended price higher than 10 Dkk)
www.bookscan.dk
16 WWW.DANISHLITERARYMAGAZINE.INFO
Recently sold Danish Fiction Sold Abroad
Hungary
September 2010 – February 2011
Animus: Hammer&Hammer Svinehunde Animus: Jussi Adler-Olsen Fasandræberne Animus: A. J Kazinski Den sidste gode mand Animus: Jussi Adler-Olsen Kvinden i buret L’Harmattan: Trisse Gejl Patriarken Nyitott Könyvmyhely: Kaaberbøl & Friis: Drengen i kufferten + Et stille umærkeligt drab Typotex Publishing: Harald Voetmann Vågen
Brazil Suma de Letras (Objetiva): Dorph & Pasternak Trilogien
Bulgaria Balkani Publishing: Adda Djørup Den mindste modstand Balkani Publishing: Erling Jepsen Biroller
Iceland China Fantasy Foundation: Jussi Adler-Olsen Fasandræberne Fantasy Foundation: Jussi Adler-Olsen Flaskepost fra P Fantasy Foundation: Jussi Adler-Olsen Kvinden i buret Shang Shu Culture Media Co.: Jussi Adler-Olsen Fasandræberne Shang Shu Culture Media Co.: Jussi Adler-Olsen Flaskepost fra P Shanh Shu Culture Media Co.: Jussi Adler-Olsen Kvinden i buret
Bjartur: Naja Maria Aidt Bavian Forlagid: Kaaberbøl & Friis Et stille umærkeligt drab
Israel Keter Book: Peter Høeg Elefantpassernes børn Simtaot: Peter Adolphsen Brummstein
Iraq Croatia
Al-Mada Publishing: Kirsten Thorup Bonsai
Hrvatsko filolosko drustvo: Karen Blixen Babettes Gæstebud
Italy Estonia Eesti Raamat: Karen Blixen Syv fantastiske fortællinger Eesti Raamat: Klaus Rifbjerg Anna (jeg) Anna Ny Norden: Ida Jessen ABC Ny Norden: Ida Jessen En kom til byen
Einaudi: Elsebeth Egholm Vold og magt Fazi Editore: Lene Kaaberbøl Kadaverdoktoren Iperborea: Flemming Jensen Bankrøver Blues Iperborea: Olav Hergel Indvandreren Lantana Editore: Gretelise Holm Møgkællinger
Ethiopia
Japan
Fabula Arts: Klaus Rifbjerg De hellige aber
Finland
Hayakawa: A. J Kazinski Den sidst gode mand Hayakawa: Jussi Adler-Olsen Fasandræberne Hayakava: Jussi Adler-Olsen Journal 64
Gummerus: Jussi Adler-Olsen Fasandræberne Gummerus: Jussi Adler-Olsen Journal 64
Latvia
France
Atena: Karen Blixen Sidste Fortællinger Zwaigne Publishers: Jussi Adler-Olsen Kvinden i buret
Actes Sud: Peter Høeg Elefantpassernes børn Fleuve Noir: Kaaberbøl & Friis: Drengen i kufferten + Et stille umærkeligt drab Gaïa: Leif Davidsen Min broders vogter Le Cherche Midi: Elsebeth Egholm Liv og legeme Libella/Maren Shell: Carsten Jensen Sidste rejse
Germany Droemer/Knaur: Lene Rikke Bressen Set fra himlen DTV: Jussi Adler-Olsen Alfabethuset DTV: Jussi Adler-Olsen Journal 64 Fischer Verlag: Jeanette Øbro & Ole Tornbjerg Skrig under vand Hanser Verlag: Jane Teller Kom Heyne: Michael Katz Krefeld Protokollen Osburg Verlag: Tom Buk-Swienty Slagtebænk Dybbøl Piper: Julie Hastrup En torn i øjet Ullstein: Benny Bødker / Karen Vad Bruun Blod vil have blod
Greece Psichogios Publishers: Peter Høeg Elefantpassernes børn
Lituania Tyto Alba: Peter Høeg Elefantpassernes børn
Norway Aschehoug: Peter Høeg Elefantpassernes børn Aschehoug: Steffen Jacobsen Den gode datter Aschehaug: Glenn Ringtved Dreamteam 9 - Rigtige venner Cappelen Damm: Sanne Munk Jensen Satans yngel Forlaget Press: Annelise Marstrand-Jørgensen Hildegaard Front Forlag: Preben Mørkbak Sven Tveskæg Gyldendal: Karen Blixen Den afrikanske Farm Gyldendal: Karen Blixen Syv fantastiske Fortællinger Gyldendal: Lene Kaaberbøl Kadaverdoktoren Piratforlaget: Mathilde Walter Clark Priapus Piratforlaget: Susanne Staun Døderummet Press: Carsten Jensen UD Schibsted: Elsebeth Egholm Skjulte fejl og mangler + Selvrisiko + Personskade + Nærmeste pårørende Versal: Julie Hastrup En torn i øjet
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Poland MUZA: Karen Blixen Den afrikanske Farm Wydawnictwo Insignis: Jeanette Øbro & Ole Tornbjerg Skrig under vand Zysk i S-ka Wydawnictwo: Lars Husum Mit venskab med Jesus Kristus
Dutton/Penguin: Jussi Adler-Olsen Kvinden i buret New Academia: Einar Rud Giorgio Vasari Open Letter: Henrik Nordbrandt Udvalgte digte Other Press: Peter Høeg Elefantpassernes børn
Romania Trei: A. J Kazinski Den sidste gode mand Crime Scene: Leif Davidsen Min broders vogter
Russia
Danish Non-Fiction Books Sold Abroad September 2010 – February 2011
Ripol via OKNO: Lars Husum Mit venskab med Jesus Kristus
Serbia Karpos Books: Harald Voetmann Vågen
Bulgaria Janet 45: Jesper Juul Dit kompetente barn
Slovakia Slovart: Peter Høeg Elefantpassernes børn
France
Spain
Chronique Sociale: Jesper Juul Dit kompetente barn Chronique Sociale: Jesper Juul Kunsten at sige nej
Editiones B: Peter Høeg Elefantpassernes børn Ediciones B: Leonora Christina Skov Silhuet af en synder Ediciones B: A. J Kazinski Den sidste gode mand
Germany Moby Dick Verlag: Lars Steen Pedersen Riis Heyne Verlag: Bjarne Schilling Håndbog for halvgamle mænd
Sweden Albert Bonniers Förlag: Carsten Jensen UD Ariel Förlag: Inger Christensen Hemmelighedstilstanden Daidalos: Oskar K Lejren Forum: Kim Leine Tunu Optimal Press: Rikke Bakman Glimt
Iceland
Taiwan
Norway
Morning Star Publishing: Lars Husum Mit venskab med Jesus Kristus
Gyldendal: Tina Scheftelowitz Kvinde kend din krop
The Netherlands
Sweden
A.W. Bruna: Hammer & Hammer Ensomme hjerters klub de Geus: Leif Davidsen Min broders vogter Meulenhoff/Boekerij: Kaaberbøl & Friis Et stille umærkeligt drab Prometheus: Jussi Adler-Olsen Alfabethuset Prometheus: Jussi Adler-Olsen Journal 64 Prometheus: Jussi Adler-Olsen Og hun takkede guderne Prometheus: Jeanette Øbro & Ole Tornbjerg Skrig under vand Prometheus: Jussi Adler-Olsen Washington-dekretet Watervis: Per Hultberg Præludier
Nordstredts Förlag: Kirsten Bruhn Møller Flora i farver Nordstredts Förlag: F. Jensen & F.T. Petersen Insekter i farver Nordstredts Förlag: E.S. Jensen Sten i farver
Forlagid: Lene Hansson Sund og Slank på 8 uger
Italy Feltrinelli: Jesper Juul Samtaler med forældre
United Kingdom Grub Street: Paul Cunningham Paul Food
Turky
Danish Children’s Books Sold Abroad
Pegasus Yainlari: Peter Høeg Elefantpassernes børn Pegasus Yainlari: Peter Høeg Den stille pige
September 2010 – February 2011
Ukraine
Austria
Folio: Peter Høeg Frøken Smilla Folio: Peter Høeg Den stille Pige
Picus: Morten Dürr Slip aldrig Samiras hånd
Brazil United Kingdom Amazon Crossing: Peter Adolphsen Brummstein Dedalus Limites: William Heinesen Moder Syvstjerne Harvill Press: Peter Høeg Elefantpassernes børn Soho Press - Random House: Kaaberbøl & Friis Drengen i kufferten + Et stille umærkeligt drab UWA Publishing: Ida Jessen Børnene
Editora Fundamento: Lene Kaaberbøl Skammerserien
China ?: Lone Munksgaard Nielsen og Hanne Bartholin Dinosauruspulveret ?: Mats Letén og Hanne Bartholin Finn Hermann ?: Mette Moestrup og Charlotte Pardi Sneugleungen Ulla
Czech Republic USA Dutton/Pinguin: Jussi Adler-Olsen Fasandræberne
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Pierot: Sissel Bøe & Peter Madsen Troldeliv, Spor Pierot: Jan Kjær Menneskejægeren 1
Faroe Islands Bokadeildin: Morten Dürr Lines rekordbog Bokadeildin: Trine Bundsgaard Mike og talenterne Bokadeildin: Mette Egelund Olsen Mor får en kæreste Bokadeildin: Jakob Strid Mimbo Jimbo har det sjovt
Finland NyNorden: Kim Fupz Sallies historier
Clever Media: Jakob Strid Mimbo Jimbo Clever Media: Jakob Strid Da lille Madsens hus blæste væk Clever Media: Glenn Ringtved og Charlotte Pardi Kys mig jeg hader dig Clever Media: Glenn Ringtved og Charlotte Pardi Rend mig i agterstavnen Olma Media Group: Kenneth Bøgh Andersen Djævelens lærling Olma Media Group: Kenneth Bøgh Andersen Dødens terning Olma Media Group: Kenneth Bøgh Andersen Den forkerte død Olma Media Group: Kenneth Bøgh Andersen Ondskabens engel
Germany Carl-Hanser verlag: Louis Jensen 2 kroner og 25 øre Franck-Kosmos: Ina Bruhn Gennem nattens gader Franck-Kosmos: Ina Bruhn Under englens vinger Franck-Kosmos: David Meinke Aberne Franck-Kosmos: David Meinke Rod Franck-Kosmos: Caroline Ørsum Den røde sofa Franck-Kosmos: Caroline Ørsum Sporene ender Lappan: Svend Otto S. Grimms bedste eventyr Urachhaus: Bodil Bredsdorff Pigerne i Villa Sorrento
Japan ?: Kim Fupz Aakeson Mor ?: Charlotte Blay Hot-dog ? Kim Fupz Aakeson og Eva Eriksson Manden og damen og noget i maven
Korea BookInFish: Katrine Marie Guldager Lydia og kunsten at dele Blue Wing: Jan Kjær Menneskejægeren (3) Gitan Children’s Books: Hanne Kvist og Hanne Bartholin Lille NØ Borim Press: Leif Esper Andersen Træl og fri
Spain Fortuna: Henning Kure & Peter Madsen Valhalla (7) Ormen i dybet Fortuna: Sissel Bøe & Peter Madsen Troldeliv 1
Sweden Berghs forlag: Ida-Marie Rendtorff Dalia 3. Slavelandet Berghs forlag: Kim Fupz Aakeson Vitello bliver forretningsmand Hegas: Morten Dürr Marias dukke Hegas: Peter Gotthardt Grevinden med den sorte maske Hegas: Sissel Dalsgaard Thomsen Vips og klub Dracula Hegas: Peter Gotthardt En verdensomsejling under havet Hegas: Jan Kjær LINK Kong Neos løver (1) Hjulet: Oskar K Det store kamelvæddeløb Nypon: Peter Gotthardt Det fortryllede slot 1-3 Nypon: Cecilie Eken Den sorte safir 2 – Den mørke vej Nypon: Morten Dürr Djævledukken Opal: Annette Koeller Berg Stop så det der Opal: Bodil El Jørgensen Esme & Igor 3. De tavse børn Opal: Svend Otto S. H.C.Andersens bedste eventyr Rabén & Sjögren: Lene Kaaberbøl Vildheks 1-2 X Publishing: Lotte Ruby Den sidste weekend i verden
Latvia Jumava: Sissel Bøe & Peter Madsen Troldeliv 1-2
Turky Pegasus Yayinlari: Lene Kaaberbøl Skammerserien
Norway United Kingdom
Det Norske Samlaget: Lene Kaaberbøl Vildheks Engelstad: Jakob Strid Mimbo Jimbo har det sjovt Front Forlag: Peter Gotthardt Elverdronningens børn 1-2 Front Forlag: Jesper Christiansen Ronin (1) Sværdet Front Forlag: Josefine Ottesen Heltemod og kragetær Front Forlag: Josefine Ottesen Lynild og ormehug Gyldendal: Morgenthaler Dyrefabler (2) Gyldendal: Ole Lund Kirkegård Otto er et næsehorn, Gummitarzan, Hodja fra Pjort Gyldendal: Ole Lund Kirkegård De hæslige slynglers klub Gyldendal: Ole Lund Kirkegård Anton og Arnold Schibsted: Jan Kjær LINK Kong Neos løver (1) Schibsted: Jan Kjær Taynikma 11 – Skyggebæsterne og Taynikma 12 – Teneborea
Denmark
Poland
Nimbus Film: Kenneth Bøgh Andersen Djævelens lærling Copenhagen Bombay: Kaspar Colling Nielsen Mount København
Jaguar: : Kenneth Bøgh Andersen Djævelens lærling Jaguar: : Kenneth Bøgh Andersen Dødens terning Jaguar: : Kenneth Bøgh Andersen Ondskabens engel Wykawnictwo: Kim Fupz Aakeson Vitello vil have en far Wykawnictwo: Kim Fupz Aakeson Vitello ridser en bil Wykawnictwo: Kim Fupz Aakeson Vitello ønsker sig en hund
Strident: Jane Teller Intet
Vietnam Kim Dong Publishing: Jan Kjær Taynikma 1-10
Film Rights Sold September 2010 – February 2011
Germany Peter Wedel FILM (GGA): Annette Herzog Flyvere på himlen
Russia Atticus: Sissel Bøe & Peter Madsen Troldeliv 1-6 Clever Media: Glenn Ringtved og Charlotte Pardi For sent Clever Media: Ida-Marie Rendtorff og Charlotte Pardi Ridder Oskar og Kong Vinter
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Books in brief
Janne Teller’s novel Nothing – ten years on and a major international success More than 110,000 copies of Nothing have been sold in Germany since its publication there in August 2010. Spanish and English editions to be published in Spring 2011. This year Janne Teller’s teenage novel Nothing can not only celebrate its tenth anniversary, but also the fact that it is now winning international acclaim. To mark the anniversary a new edition of the novel is being published in Denmark. In 2008 the French translation of Nothing won Le Prix Libbylit for the best children’s book in the Frenchspeaking world. Since it first appeared Nothing has been translated into countless languages and been read and re-read by schoolchildren both in Denmark and abroad. In 2001 Nothing was awarded the Danish Ministry of Culture’s Children’s Book Prize and has since established itself as a classic Danish teenage novel, one which deals with the big existential questions about the meaning of life in a way to which young people can relate. Janne Teller Intet / Nothing Gyldendal 2011, 200 pp.
Harald Voetmann Vågen / Awake Gyldendal 2010, 160 pp. Foreign rights Gyldendal Group Agency Sofie Voller Tel.: + 45 33 75 55 55 e-mail: sofie_voller@gyldendal.dk
Mirror Lands wins prestigious readers’ award Mirror Lands by Birgithe Kosovic was awarded the leading Danish weekly Weekendavisen’s 2010 Prize for Literature. Mirror Lands is a bleak existential story about the former Yugoslavia and its dissolution. The central character, former party secretary Milovan, seeks refuge from the war in the mountains of Hercegovina and from there he observes the breakdown of the country. He thinks back on the troubles and tragic events in his past and through these memories he tells the story of his country and its people.
Foreign Rights Gyldendal Group Agency Sofie Voller Tel.: + 45 33 75 55 55 e-mail: sofie_voller@gyldendal.dk
Read about Mirror Lands in Danish Literary Magazine Autumn 2010
Publication rights sold to USA, UK, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Croatia, Slovenia, Norway, Sweden, Finland and South Korea among others.
Foreign Rights Gyldendal Group Agency Sofie Voller Tel.: + 45 33 75 55 55
Birgithe Kosovic Det dobbelte land / Mirror Lands Gyldendal 2010, 254 pp.
Awake sold to two foreign publishers
Previous titles published in France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Norway, Spain and Sweden
Harald Voetmann’s historical novel Awake has just been sold to Hungary and Serbia. Publishers in both countries are scheduling publication for next year. Harald Voetmann has been nominated for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize.
Jussi Adler-Olsen awarded the Golden Laurels 2010
Awake deals with the life of the Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder (AD 23-79) and his work on his massive masterpiece Naturalis Historia, which Harald Voetmann has previously translated into Danish and published in extract form. Voetmann himself describes Awake as ‘a vision of Pliny the Elder’s world’ and in it he presents an account of one man’s unquenchable curiosity and thirst for knowledge. Read about Awake in Danish Literary Magazine Autumn 2010.
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This year’s Golden Laurels – the Danish booksellers’ award – went to Jussi Adler Olsen for his novel Journal 64. Jussi Adler Olsen has already met with great success in Germany and Journal 64 is to be published in the UK in the spring of 2011. Journal 64 is the fourth novel in the series about Detective Superintendent Carl Mørk and Department Q at Police Headquarters in Copenhagen. Adler-Olsen’s books are extremely popular with readers and sell in exceptionally large numbers. The whole series has already
been translated into several languages, been sold to many countries, including the USA and the UK, and has gone down particularly well in Germany. Jussi Adler-Olsen’s books have previously won him the Glass Key, awarded by the Crime Writers of Scandinavia. Jussi Adler-Olsen Journal 64 / Journal 64 Politikens Forlag 2010, 416 pp. Foreign rights Politikens Forlag Nya Guldberg Tel.: + 45 33 47 07 93 e-mail: nya.guldberg@jppol.dk Previous titles published in Germany, Holland and Norway
Jesper Wung-Sung wins children’s book prize Jesper Wung-Sung has been awarded the 2010 Danish Ministry of Culture Prize for Best Book for Children and Young People with his novel The Copies. The Copies is a dystopic thriller about Jonas, who comes home one day from football to find that his parents won’t let him in. Instead, two men come to arrest Jonas. He runs off into the forest and here he meets Ian and Ronnie. It turns out that all three boys are actually copies, given to the couples they thought were their parents to fill the place of their real children until they return to them. Now the copies have to be destroyed. The Copies looks at the potential consequences of genetic engineering and, more particularly, the question of personal identity. Jesper Wung-Sung Kopierne / The Copies Høst & Søn 2010, 166 pp. Foreign Rights Rosinante & Co. Anette Øster Tel.: + 45 33 41 18 33 e-mail: AO@rosinante-co.dk
Lilian Brøgger receives illustrator award Lilian Brøgger has been presented with The Danish Ministry of Culture Illustrator Prize for her work on the new Danish edition of The Sorrows of Young Werther. As illustrator of this reissue of Goethe’s little masterpiece The Sorrows of Young Werther Lilian Brøgger has been commended, above all, for her ability to reflect the multifaceted nature of this tale. In her graphic universe Lilian Brøgger succeeds in achieving just the right balance between solemn passion and quiet suppressed mirth. And through her shifting, kaleidoscopic, modern illustrations she presents a uniquely original interpretation of Goethe’s novel. The Sorrows of Young Werther is the fourth volume in the Illustrated World Classics series published by the Danish Teachers’ Association. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / Retold by Ole Dalgaard Den unge Werthers lidelser / The Sorrows of Young Werther Illustrated by Lillian Brøgger Dansklærerforeningens Forlag 2010, 140 pp. Foreign Rights Dansklærerforeningens Forlag Rie Lynge Hansen Tel.: + 45 33 79 00 10 E-mail: rlh@dansklf.dk
Adda Djørup and the EU Prize for Literature The 2010 EU Prize for Literature goes to Adda Djørup In November 2010 Adda Djørup became the Danish winner of the 2010 EU Prize for Literature for her book The Least Resistance. This novel, published in 2009, tells the story of Emma, a woman whose life suddenly takes a radical turn. Adda Djørup made her literary debut in 2005 with the poetry collection Monsieur’s Monologues. In 2007 she published the short story collection If You Began to Ask Yourself. The Least Resistance has been sold to Bulgaria. Adda Djørup Den mindste modstand / The Least Resistance Samleren 2009, 128 pp. Foreign Rights Gyldendal Group Agency Sofie Voller Tel.: + 45 33 75 55 55 e-mail: sofie_voller@gyldendal.dk
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Denmark’s favourite crime novel: The Dinosaur Feather
The Sumo Brothers wins readers’ hearts Danske Banks Prize for Literature goes to Morten Ramsland
Sissel Jo-Gazan’s crime novel The Dinosaur Feather has been named Denmark’s Favourite Crime Novel 2000-2010. It will be published in the USA and the UK in the spring of 2011. Danmarks Radio’s Crime Readers’ Club has voted Sissel Jo-Gazan’s The Dinosaur Feather the best Danish crime novel for the years 2000-2010. Published in 2008, it is a scientific thriller set in palaeontology circles at the University of Copenhagen. The Dinosaur Feather has been sold to 15 countries and has already been published in Italy, Holland, Sweden, Norway, Germany and Spain.
Morten Ramsland won the Danske Bank Prize for Literature 2010. The prize, worth 40.200 euro, was presented at the opening of the Danish Book Fair. The winner of the Danske Bank Prize is chosen by Danish readers. First, a panel of judges nominates three works for the prize, then readers are invited to vote for one of these. More than 31,000 readers placed their vote in 2010. Morten Ramsland won this prestigious book award for his book The Sumo Brothers, published in 2009, which received rave reviews in the Danish press. Ramsland’s novel depicts the tough world of a group of young boys on a provincial housing estate in 1981.
Read about The Dinosaur Feather in Danish Literary Magazine spring 2009 Sissel Jo-Gazan Dinosaurens fjer / The Dinosaur Feather Gyldendal 2008, 446 pp.
Morten Ramsland made his entry onto the Danish literary scene in 1993, but his big breakthrough came in 2005 with his bestselling novel Doghead, which has been translated into German, English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Slovenian, Swedish, Spanish and Russian.
Foreign Rights Gyldendal Group Agency Sofie Voller Tel.: + 45 33 75 55 55 e-mail: sofie_voller@gyldendal.dk
Morten Ramsland Sumobrødrene / The Sumo Brothers Rosinante 2010, 256 pp.
Jørn Riel honoured
Foreign rights Gyldendal Group Agency Sofie Voller Tel.: + 45 33 75 55 55 e-mail: sofie_voller@gyldendal.dk
The Danish Academy’s Grand Prize awarded to Jørn Riel for his distinguished body of work. Jørn Riel has been honoured by the Danish Academy for his long and distinguished writing career – one which spans forty years and a great many genres: from children’s books and travel biographies to tall tales and novels. As the jury says in its motivation: “In presenting this prize to Jørn Riel the Danish Academy wishes to pay tribute to a wide-ranging body of work founded on an unmistakable delight in storytelling, a warm heart and great good humour”. Jørn Riel made his literary debut in 1970 with A Tale to Give You A Beautiful Face, a collection of tall tales from Greenland where Riel lived for some years. Since then he has published more than 60 books and been translated into 19 languages. Jørn Riel Foreign Rights Gaïa Editions Susanne Juul e-mail: susanne.juul@gaia-editions.com
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The Nordic countries at the Salon du Livre 2011 The Nordic countries were guests of honour at the Paris Book Fair, the Salon du Livre, which was held from the 17th to the 21st March 2011. This is the first time that the literature of all the Nordic countries together has been presented as a theme at an international book fair of this size. Forty Nordic writers were invited to attend – all of them with works translated into French and published in France. Among the Danish writers taking part were Jonas T. Bengtsson, Bodil Bredsdorff, Leif Davidsen, Jens Christian Grøndahl, Merete Pryds Helle, Helle Helle, Carsten Jensen, Erling Jepsen and Jørn Riel. Also there were Aaju (Kristian Olsen) from Greenland and Rakel Helmsdal from the Faeroe Isles.
Two particularly noteworthy books Each year the Danish Arts Foundation’s Committee for Literature awards special prizes to books which it considers particularly worthy of note. The Danish Arts Foundation’s Committee for Literature’s prizes for 2010 were awarded to works by writers Tom Buk-Swienty and Christina Hesselholdt. Tom Buk-Swienty received his prize for Doomsday Als - the second and final part of his critically-acclaimed history of Denmark’s defeat by the Prussians in 1864. The first volume is now also available in German. The prize to Christina Hesselholdt was awarded for Camilla – and the rest of the company, a sequel to the novel Camilla and the Horse from 2008. Read more about Camilla – and the rest of the company in this issue of Danish Literary Magazine, page 4. Tom Buk-Swienty Dommedag Als / Doomsday Als Gyldendal 2010, 496 pp. Foreign rights Gyldendal Group Agency Sofie Voller Tel.: + 45 33 75 55 55 e-mail: sofie_voller@gyldendal.dk Christina Hesselholdt Camilla – og resten af selskabet / Camilla – and the rest of the company Rosinante 2010, 144 pp. Foreign rights Gyldendal Group Agency Sofie Voller Tel.. + 45 33 75 55 55 e-mail: sofie_voller@gyldendal.dk
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