Novelist

First I played. Built huts out of branches and leaves. Made bows and arrows, hacking flint for arrowheads. Collected flowers to make tea or use the sap to heal wounds and insect-bites. Weaving, knitting, braiding belts, vests and moccasins. Drawing plans for the days of play in the woods. Being most days a Cherokee boy called Paw. Seamlessly disregarding my Danish gender, blonde hair and blue eyes.

Then I started writing. Songs, stories, the dreams I was dreaming at night, and dreams of the days too.

When I was 22 my first novel was published and my career as a professional writer started. From then on playing got harder.

But even though I have only published two novels in the space of 30 years, the novel is still the artform that I feel most closely connected to. The genre in which I am working towards one day being able to express the polyphonic magic of the world as I see it.

Thanks to somatics coach Rachel Blackman for the juicy explorative conversation from which you will find bits and pieces spread around all over these pages.

Novels

Featured

Messi of the Ramblas - and His Season in El Paral.lel

MESSI OF THE RAMBLAS is a hilarious, enthralling and heart-warming story about the kaleidoscope of people living in an old apartment building in the neighbourhood called El Paral.lel in Barcelona.

First published in Danish in 2017, and subsequently in Swedish and Norwegian in 2019, the book has been hailed as "a masterpiece with potential to be cult".

“Fejltagelsernes Bog” [The Book of Mistakes]

THE BOOK OF MISTAKES is a book about the globalised cult of the local football team in Barcelona that both unites and divides. It takes place in a neighborhood and a building behind Barcelona’s Avinguda del Paral·lel in Spain from the spring of 2009, and in the Prague Airport in Ruzyne in the Czech Republic during the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyafjallajokull 12 months later.

“Papayapassionen” [The Passion of the Papaya]

The book was inspired by this short paragraph that could be read on the front page of Danish newspaper Politiken on November 4. 1984 :
”Chained to a tree for 17 years. The police in Venezuela liberated a 21 year old man Friday, who had been chained to a tree for 17 years of his life. According to sources in the capital of Venezuela, Caracas, the young mal-nourished man was immediately sent to a hospital to recuperate. As a 4 year old he was put in the care of his grandmother who felt she wasn’t able to handle him.