 Denmark's
Ib Michael (b. 1945), who resides in Copenhagen, is one of the most popular
writers in the Nordic countries. He studied medicine and travelled widely
before becoming a writer. His first works were in fact travel books. Since
the early 1970s, Ib Michel has written fifteen novels and diaries and
three collections of poems. His trilogy of novels - Vanillepigen
(1991,The Vanilla Girl), Den tolvte rytter (1993, The Midnight
Soldier) and Brev till månen (1995, Letter to the Moon) -
is regarded as the greatest achievement of Danish literature in the 1990s.
It gained the highest award of the Danish Academy in 1995 and has been
translated into nine languages. In the trilogy, Ib Michael creates a mythical
past for himself, a family that can trace its roots back to the conquerors
of the new continent and the Red Indians of Utatlan. It is about twelve
riders, eleven of whom set off in search of happiness and destruction
in the hot Mexican desert, the freezing Danish night, in the bars and
cemeteries of Roskilde. The steed of the twelfth waits for a little boy,
a young man and an adventurer who has already seen life in a dream and
in the shadows of the night. Ib Michael's latest novel Prins (1997,
Prince) also met with an ecstatic response in both Denmark and Norway.
A striking feature of Ib Michael's output is how he juxtaposes far-removed
and even opposing tendencies. Tenderness and cruelty, joy and pain, youth
and maturity, the flight of the imagination and sense, local flavour and
universality, the private and the public form surprising combinations. |