Thorkild Hansen (1927 - 1989) was an early proponent and a master of documentary fiction; his major works published in the 1960s became very popular in Scandinavia and best-sellers in his native Denmark.
Focusing on obscure figures and forgotten episodes in Denmark´s past, he introduced a new genre of documentary-historical fiction to Danish letters.
Det lykkelige Arabien (1962; translated as Arabia Felix, 1964), a reconstruction of the Danish expedition to Arabia in 1761-67 led by Carsten Niebuhr, marks Hansen´s literary break-through.
His next successful documentary novel, a work about the Northwest Expedition of 1619-20 led by Captain Jens Munk,
Jens Munk (1965; translated as The Way to Hudson Bay: The Life and Times of Jens Munk, 1970) focuses on another venture in Denmark´s history of exploration and imperialism. Hansen´s magnum opus is a trilogy of works on the Danish slave trade which won him the Nordic Council´s Literary Award in 1971: Slavernes kyst (1967; The Slave Coast), Slavernes skibe (1968; The Slave Ships), and Slavernes øer (1970; The Slave Islands).
Thorkild Hansen is one of the great "travelers" in modern Danish letters; his documentary works reach back into history and out into the far corners of the globe. His technique - involving extensive research into authentic documents and expeditions to the historical loci - was highly innovative in his day. He deliberately walked a tight-rope between fact and fiction, demonstrating great skill as a novelist as well as impressive talent as a historian. More daring and provocative than other documentary writers of the period, he undertook ambitious and controversial topics while challenging the disciplinary boundaries between history and fiction with all the hazards involved.
His last major work, the three-volume Processen mod Hamsun (1978; The Case against Hamsun), dealing with Knut Hamsun and Norway´s Quisling era, stirred up a heated controversy in Scandinavia; nearly two decades later, the work served as a basis for Jan Troell´s motion picture Hamsun (1996).
Thorkild Hansen´s entire authorship is strongly influenced by the existentialist perspective of postwar Europe. Like Sisyphus of ancient myth, Hansen´s historical protagonists struggle against impossible odds; their destinies are ultimately futile, yet their struggles are heroic. In Hansen´s authorship the Nietzschean concept of amor fati takes on an absurd dimension, inspired in particular by Albert Camus´ Le Mythe de Sisyphe (which Hansen addressed in a 1947-essay).
More than any other writer in postwar Danish letters, Thorkild Hansen´s private life has also attracted considerable attention, particularly after his death in 1989. Private documents (such as personal letters and journals) fascinated him and inspired his projects, enabling him to reconstruct and interpret the destines of figures such as Carsten Niebuhr, Jens Munk, and Knut Hamsun. Although the publication of selections from his diaries stirred up a considerable debate in Denmark, it will be for his substantial documentary best-sellers that Thorkild Hansen will be remembered.
