Five books by writers from Denmark, set there, that give a real sense of the place, starting with The Copenhagen Trilogy and We, the Drowned.
Denmark has three Nobel laureates in literature, the latest being Johannes V. Jensen in 1944, and Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales are known worldwide. Henrik Pontoppidan shared the prize in 1917 with Karl Gjellerup, and his Lucky Per tells of a Jutland pastor's son who rises in Copenhagen's world of ambition and engineering. Class, farmland and the sea run through much Danish fiction.
Martin Andersen Nexø's Pelle the Conqueror, translated from Danish, shows a Swedish immigrant boy and his father enduring farm labour on late nineteenth-century Bornholm, before Pelle joins the labour movement. Tove Ditlevsen's The Copenhagen Trilogy is a memoir of growing up poor in working-class Vesterbro. Carsten Jensen's We, the Drowned is an epic of the seafaring town of Marstal, following generations from 1848 through the two world wars.
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Memoir of growing up poor in working-class Vesterbro, then life as a young writer in interwar and wartime Copenhagen.
Epic of the seafaring town of Marstal on the island of Ærø, following generations from 1848 through the two world wars.
A Swedish immigrant boy and his father endure farm labour and poverty on late nineteenth-century Bornholm, and Pelle later joins the labour movement.
A Jutland pastor's son rises in Copenhagen's world of ambition and engineering in the late nineteenth century, in a sweeping portrait of Danish society.
A classic of Danish realism that follows a freethinking young man through provincial Jutland and Copenhagen in the nineteenth century.
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