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Tove Ditlevsen: Why it’s time to discover Denmark’s most famous literary outsider

9 classics to celebrate women in translation

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The Umbrella

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 
 
‘Then she would feel exposed and cry, as if her life and happiness were ruined for all time, even though she could still hide it from those she only came in contact with by chance or infrequently.’ 
 
Longing shimmers from these spare but profoundly moving short stories by one of Denmark’s most fearless and sharp-eyed authors. In these tales of inarticulate desire and repression, Ditlevsen pulls to the surface our deepest interiorities in devastating, exacting prose.

Tove Ditlevsen was born in 1917 in a working-class neighbourhood in Copenhagen. Her first volume of poetry was published when she was in her early twenties, and was followed by many more books, including the novels The Faces and Vilhelm's Room and her autobiographical masterpiece, Childhood (1967), Youth (1967) and Dependency (1971). She married four times and died by suicide in 1976.

‘Then she would feel exposed and cry, as if her life and happiness were ruined for all time, even though she could still hide it from those she only came in contact with by chance or infrequently.’ 
 
Longing shimmers from these spare but profoundly moving short stories by one of Denmark’s most fearless and sharp-eyed authors. In these tales of inarticulate desire and repression, Ditlevsen pulls to the surface our deepest interiorities in devastating, exacting prose.

There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die

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A new selection of poetry from the generation-defining author of The Copenhagen Trilogy, translated for the first time into English 
 
While Tove Ditlevsen is now famous around the world as an extraordinary prose writer, in Denmark she has also long been celebrated as a poet. She published her first collection in her early twenties, and continued writing and publishing poetry until the end of her life. This new selection offers English readers a chance to explore her brilliant, surprising verse across nearly four decades of writing. 
 
In this playful, mournful, witty collection, little girls stand tip-toe inside adult bodies, achievements in literature and lethargy are unflinchingly listed, and lovers come and go like the seasons. Gorgeously translated by Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith, with an introduction by Olga Ravn, There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die cements Ditlevsen as one of the twentieth century's most creative writers.

Meet the finest (and darkest) poet you’ve never read … Her poems read, at their best, like illuminations, transfiguring her life again and again

Tove Ditlevsen (Author) Tove Ditlevsen was born in 1917 in a working-class neighbourhood in Copenhagen. Her first volume of poetry was published when she was in her early twenties, and was followed by many more books, including the novels The Faces and Vilhelm's Room and her autobiographical masterpiece, Childhood (1967), Youth (1967) and Dependency (1971). She married four times and died by suicide in 1976. Olga Ravn (Introducer) Olga Ravn is one of Denmark’s most celebrated contemporary authors. Her novel The Employees was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2021, the Ursula K.Le Guin Prize and longlisted for the National Book Awards and the Dublin Literary Award. Her novel My Work won the Politikens Literature Prize in 2021 and led to changes in the country’s maternity rights. She has also written shorter pieces for the New Yorker, the Paris Review and Granta. Sophia Hersi Smith (Translator) Sophia Hersi Smith is a translator living in Copenhagen. Together with Jennifer Russell, she has translated fiction and poetry by Danish writers such as Olga Ravn, Tove Ditlevsen and Solvej Balle. Jennifer Russell (Translator) Jennifer Russell is a translator living in Copenhagen. Together with Sophia Hersi Smith, she has translated fiction and poetry by Danish writers such as Olga Ravn, Tove Ditlevsen and Solvej Balle.

While Tove Ditlevsen is now famous around the world as an extraordinary prose writer, in Denmark she has also long been celebrated as a poet. She published her first collection in her early twenties, and continued writing and publishing poetry until the end of her life. This new selection offers English readers a chance to explore her brilliant, surprising verse across nearly four decades of writing. 
 
In this playful, mournful, witty collection, little girls stand tip-toe inside adult bodies, achievements in literature and lethargy are unflinchingly listed, and lovers come and go like the seasons. Gorgeously translated by Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith, with an introduction by Olga Ravn, There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die cements Ditlevsen as one of the twentieth century's most creative writers.

and Other Stories

The Trouble with Happiness

'So clear is Ditlevsen's eye that it is impossible to tear yourself away' John Self, Guardian 
 
An unforgettable collection of stories from the author of The Copenhagen Trilogy 
 
'The most important thing is probably always precisely the thing you can't have. That's where all the happiness is' 
 
In these brief, acid-sharp stories of love, marriage and family from one of Denmark's most celebrated writers, the ordinary events of everyday life - a wife anxious not to wake her husband, a little boy losing his father's beloved knife, a woman's obsessive longing for a yellow silk umbrella - become dark and disconcerting. Here Tove Ditlevsen explores yearning, fear and the elusiveness of that strange thing called happiness. 
 
'The purity and dazzling insight of Ditlevsen's writing speaks for itself' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Authentic, unforced and utterly lucid' Sunday Times 
 
'Ditlevsen's wonderful and devastatingly bleak short stories simmer with melancholy and despair' Daily Mail 
 
Translated by Michael Favala Goldman

Splendid short stories... the purity and dazzling insight of Ditlevsen's writing speaks for itself

An intense reading experience... so clear is Ditlevsen's eye that it's impossible to tear yourself away from the fates of her characters, however grim

These short stories show off her astonishingly precise prose

A bracingly bleak selection of stories by the celebrated Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen... These are perfectly judged pieces: authentic, unforced and utterly lucid

Ditlevsen's wonderful and devastatingly bleak short stories simmer with melancholy and despair ... Her prose is clear and spare, pared back to the essential task of describing the struggle for an unwon freedom from domestic despair and unsatisfactory marriages

The depths of desire and despair are Ditlevsen's subjects and illuminating them is her talent

Ditlevsen's writing is crystal clear and vividly, painfully raw

Her writing is incredible, so focused and clear. Not a word that doesn't need to be there

A newly married woman longs, irrationally, for a silk umbrella; a husband chases away his wife's beloved cat; a betrayed mother impulsively sacks her housekeeper. Underneath the surface of these precisely observed tales of love, marriage and family life in mid-century Copenhagen pulse currents of desire, violence and despair, as women and men dream of escaping their conventional roles and finding freedom and happiness - without ever truly understanding what that might mean.

The Copenhagen Trilogy

Childhood, Youth, Dependency

'Utterly, agonisingly compulsive ... a masterpiece' Liz Jensen, Guardian 
 
Following one woman's journey from a troubled girlhood in working-class Copenhagen through her struggle to live on her own terms, The Copenhagen Trilogy is a searingly honest, utterly immersive portrayal of love, friendship, art, ambition and the terrible lure of addiction, from one of Denmark's most celebrated twentieth-century writers. 
 
'Sharp, tough and tender ... wrenching sadness and pitch-black comedy ... Ditlevsen can pivot from hilarity to heartbreak in a trice' Boyd Tonkin Spectator 
 
'Astonishing, honest, entirely revealing and, in the end, devastating. Ditlevsen's trilogy is remarkable not only for its honesty and lyricism; these are books that journey deep into the darkest reaches of human experience and return, fatally wounded, but still eloquent' Observer 
 
'The best books I have read this year. These volumes slip in like a stiletto and do their work once inside. Thrilling' New Statesman

To get it out of the way: these are the best books I have read this year ... Childhood has the simple declarative sentences of Natalia Ginzburg and the pervasive horror of a good fairy story

Mordant, vibrantly confessional... A masterpiece

Semi-miraculous, raw and poignant ... Radiates the clear light of truth and stands as the ultimate victory of a life that must have felt, in the living of it, like a defeat

Intense, elegant ... Ditlevsen's portrait of Vesterbro in the Twenties has something of the same texture of Elena Ferrante's description of the poor Neapolitan neighbourhood in which her heroines grow up

Wrenching sadness and pitch-black comedy ... Sharp, tough and tender

A particular kind of masterpiece, one that helps fill a particular kind of void. Ditlevsen's voice, diffident and funny, dead-on about her own mistakes, is a welcome addition to that canon of women who showed us their secret faces so that we might wear our own.

Intense and elegant ... an absolute tour de force

A stunning portrait of addiction and ambition . . . unnervingly brilliant. I felt an almost physical pull to reimmerse myself in the freezing cold water of the trilogy, which understands the trauma of childhood and its reverberations like nothing else I have ever read

Ditlevsen's taut, simple prose shines a light on what life and love were like for working-class women in 20th century Copenhagen. Elena Ferrante fans, take note

Despite the darkness that haunts these three books, they shine with Ditlevsen's honesty and humanity ... Her work, seemingly so simple, has the miraculous quality of a life perceived in perfect clarity. Despite the author's untimely death, The Copenhagen Trilogy is a powerful - and uplifting - testament of survival

As in much of the best autofiction, the protagonist's weakness is counterpoised by the strength of her voice ... [Ditlevsen speaks] beyond the cruel and disappointing figures she encounters to us, her readers, awaiting her in another time and another place

Exceptional ... Her writing is impelled not only by her fine intelligence, but also by a rare focus: the compulsion to tell a particular story, and only that story

Growing up in a working-class neighbourhood in Copenhagen, Tove feels that her childhood is made for a completely different girl. As 'long, mysterious words begin to crawl across my soul', she comes to understand that she has a vocation that will define her life. Her path seems assured, but she has no idea of the struggles ahead - love affairs, wanted and unwanted pregnancies, artistic failure and destructive addiction. As the years go by, the central tension of Tove's life comes into painful focus: the terrible lure of dependency, in all its forms, and the possibility of living freely and fearlessly - as an artist on her own terms.

The Faces

'One of Denmark's most celebrated writers' New Statesman 
 
From the acclaimed author of the Copenhagen Trilogy, a searing, haunting novel of a woman on the edge, portrayed with all the vividness of lived experience. 
 
Copenhagen, 1968. Lise, a children's book writer and married mother of three, is increasingly haunted by disembodied faces and voices. She is convinced that her husband, already extravagantly unfaithful, will leave her. Most of all, she is scared that she will never write again. Yet as she descends into a world of pills and hospitals, she begins to wonder, is insanity really something to be feared, or does it bring a kind of freedom? 
 
'Ditlevsen explores the surprising contours of Lise's experience: from her point of view, madness can be funny, soft and secure, and far more enlightening than the "reality" it struggles to evade' The New York Times 
 
Translated by Tiina Nunnally

The fact that Ditlevsen was herself one of insanity's intimates does much to explain this book's harrowing authenticity. But The Faces - in Tiina Nunnally's very deliberate, close-to-the-nerve translation - rises above a case study because, working from the inside, Ditlevsen is able to explore the surprising contours of Lise's experience: from her point of view, madness can be funny, soft and secure, and far more enlightening than the "reality" it struggles to evade

A searing but never sensational account of a usually hyped theme - the struggle of the artist to do her work, without guilt about family or the outside world. Admirably without self-pity, and often ironic, Ditlevsen is a voice to heed

these are the best books I have read this year 'Praise for the Copenhagen Trilogy'

Mordant, vibrantly confessional... A masterpiece 'Praise for the Copenhagen Trilogy'

Wrenching sadness and pitch-black comedy ... Sharp, tough and tender 'Praise for the Copenhagen Trilogy'

An inspired pick, especially for those readers whose introduction to Ditlevsen's work has been the Copenhagen Trilogy

Tove Ditlevsen (Author) Tove Ditlevsen was born in 1917 in a working-class neighbourhood in Copenhagen. Her first volume of poetry was published when she was in her early twenties, and was followed by many more books, including the novels The Faces and Vilhelm's Room and her autobiographical masterpiece, Childhood (1967), Youth (1967) and Dependency (1971). She married four times and died by suicide in 1976. Tiina Nunnally (Translator) Tiina Nunnally is an award-winning translator (from Danish, Norwegian and Swedish) and novelist. She was awarded the prestigious PEN Translation Prize in 2001 for her translation of the third volume of Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter, and her translations of Hans Christian Andersen and Tove Ditlevsen for Penguin Classics have been widely praised.

Copenhagen, 1968. Lise, a children's book writer and married mother of three, is becoming increasingly haunted by disembodied faces and taunting voices. Convinced that her housekeeper and husband are plotting against her, she descends into a terrifying world of sickness, pills and institutionalization. But is sanity in fact a kind of sickness? And might mental illness itself lead to enlightenment? 
 
Brief, intense and haunting, Ditlevsen's novel recreates the experience of madness from the inside, with all the vividness of lived experience.

Dependency

'Utterly, agonisingly compulsive ... a masterpiece' Liz Jensen, Guardian 
 
The final volume in The Copenhagen Trilogy, the searing portrait of a woman's journey through love, friendship, ambition and addiction, from one of Denmark's most celebrated twentieth-century writers 
 
Tove is only twenty, but she's already famous, a published poet and wife of a much older literary editor. Her path in life seems set, yet she has no idea of the struggles ahead - love affairs, wanted and unwanted pregnancies, artistic failure and destructive addiction. As the years go by, the central tension of Tove's life comes into painful focus: the terrible lure of dependency, in all its forms, and the possibility of living freely and fearlessly - as an artist on her own terms. 
 
The final volume in The Copenhagen Trilogy, and arguably Ditlevsen's masterpiece, Dependency is a dark and blisteringly honest account of addiction, and the way out.

Tove is only twenty, but she's already famous, a published poet and wife of a much older literary editor. Her path in life seems set, but she has no idea of the struggles that lie ahead - love affairs, an unwanted pregnancy, physical pain and crippling opioid addiction. As the years go by, the central tension of Tove's life comes into painful focus: the terrible lure of dependency, in all its forms, and the possibility of living life freely and fearlessly - as an artist on her own terms. 
 
The final volume in Ditlvesen's autobiographical trilogy and perhaps her masterpiece, Dependency is a dark and blisteringly honest account of addiction, and the way out.

Childhood

'Utterly, agonisingly compulsive ... a masterpiece' Liz Jensen, Guardian 
 
The first volume in The Copenhagen Trilogy, the searing portrait of a woman's journey through love, friendship, ambition and addiction, from one of Denmark's most celebrated twentieth-century writers 
 
Tove knows she is a misfit, whose childhood is made for a completely different girl. In her working-class neighbourhood in Copenhagen, she is enthralled by her wild, red-headed friend Ruth, who initiates her into adult secrets. But Tove cannot reveal her true self to her or to anyone else. For 'long, mysterious words begin to crawl across my soul', and she comes to realize that she has a vocation, something unknowable within her - and that she must one day, painfully but inevitably, leave the narrow street of her childhood behind. 
 
Childhood, the first volume in The Copenhagen Trilogy, is a visceral portrait of girlhood and female friendship, told with lyricism and vivid intensity.

Life in Tove's neighbourhood in Copenhagen is confusing and difficult: her father can't find work, her mother is angry and remote, and Tove herself sometimes thinks she's been exchanged at birth. But 'inside of me long, mysterious words began to crawl across my soul' and she soon realizes that she has a vocation, something unknowable and secret within, and that if she can only find the right words, she will one day succeed in forging a true life of her own - somewhere beyond the narrow streets of her childhood. 
 
The first volume in Ditlvesen's autobiographical trilogy, Childhood captures the triumphs and tragedies of girlhood with intense vividness and a poet's clarity of vision.

Youth

'Utterly, agonisingly compulsive ... a masterpiece' Liz Jensen, Guardian 
 
The second volume in The Copenhagen Trilogy, the searing portrait of a woman's journey through love, friendship, ambition and addiction, from one of Denmark's most celebrated twentieth-century writers 
 
Forced to leave school early, Tove embarks on a chequered career in a string of low-paid, menial jobs. But she is hungry: for poetry, for love, for real life to begin. As Europe slides into war, she must navigate exploitative bosses, a Nazi landlady and unwelcome sexual encounters on the road to hard-won independence. Yet she remains ruthlessly determined in the pursuit of her poetic vocation - until at last the miracle she has always dreamed of appears to be within reach. 
 
Youth, the second volume in The Copenhagen Trilogy, is a strikingly honest and immersive portrait of adolescence, filled with biting humour, vulnerability and poeticism.

Unable to stay on to high school, Tove starts her first job (which lasts only one day) and soon embarks on a varied and chequered career: as au pair, cleaner, stock-room assistant and office worker. But Tove is hungry, for poetry, for love, for real life to begin. As she navigates exploitative bosses, uninspiring boyfriends and a Nazi landlady, she struggles to keep her poetic vocation in sight - until she finally realizes the 'miracle' that she has always dreamed of. 
 
The second volume in Ditlvesen's autobiographical trilogy, Youth is a sensitive, often funny and almost painfully truthful portrayal of adolescence.

Tove Ditlevsen

Sophia Hersi Smith

Jennifer Russell

Ditlevsen makes this darkest of all material fascinating, perversely likable and occasionally revelatory. She’s a brilliant writer and formidable thinker

Reading Vilhelm’s Room, the final novel from the great Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen, what hits you first is how wonderful her sentences are […] Ditlevsen’s unusual way of seeing the world, and her sprightly humour, run throughout this short book, […] which now appears in English for the first time in a spirited translation by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell […] A beguiling, often confounding novel from one of the 20th century’s most original writers

I want to write a book about Vilhelm’s room and the events which took place in it, or arose from it; those that led to Lise’s death, which I have survived only so that I might write down the story of her and Vilhelm... 
 
The ripples from a breakup radiate outwards from the room where a married couple once loved each other, and a bizarre Lonely Hearts advert sets off a train of tragicomic events that lead to an inevitable conclusion. Tove Ditlevsen’s final novel – published a year before her suicide in 1976 – is a masterful conclusion to a great work of writing: a blackly funny and devastating tour-de-force that pulses with life even as it journeys towards death.

Tove Ditlevsen

Praise for Vilhelm's Room

Ditlevsen makes this darkest of all material fascinating, perversely likable and occasionally revelatory. She’s a brilliant writer and formidable thinker

Reading Vilhelm’s Room, the final novel from the great Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen, what hits you first is how wonderful her sentences are […] Ditlevsen’s unusual way of seeing the world, and her sprightly h ...

Books by Tove Ditlevsen

Articles featuring Tove Ditlevsen

Tove Ditlevsen: Why it’s time to discover Denmark’s most famous literary outsider

9 classics to celebrate women in translation

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