No one takes up as much space in Danish literature as Klaus Rifbjerg. His work consists of more than 120 books, which permeates all genres – from poems, short stories, novels to children’s books, diaries and essays and drama, film, TV and radio – and saturates Danish culture in a way that no-one else’s does. He is the author of the most widely read and most frequently reprinted book in Danish literary history, Chronic Innocence from 1958. In the 1960s his collection of poetry, Confrontation, inaugurated a new term in Scandinavian literary criticism known as “confrontational modernism”. As a prolific debater and controversialist of the Danish press, Rifbjerg is also omnipresent in the contemporary literary and political debate.
Rifbjerg has won every Danish literary prize that matters and is also the recipient of The Nordic Council Literary Price, but he has never rested on his laurels. Instead he keeps his monumental body of work alive by each year fuelling it with another couple of titles, and although some themes (memory and repression, sexuality and liberation) are recurrent in the books, it is impossible to describe the authorship as a whole. For Rifbjerg explores and expands with each book the existing literary forms, so that the results don’t fit into the existing categories. One example is Esbern from 2005. Here, the “historical” novel is told through chronologically inconsecutive text fragments and alternating viewpoints, so that the reader receives not only a distinct impression of a certain period in Danish history but of the historical process as well – of how every historical period grows out of a struggle of disputing wills and clashing values.
It speaks of Rifbjerg’s intellectual versatility that he in the past fifty years has taken up the opposite roles of literary provocateur and managing director (of the major publishing house, Gyldendal), as avant-garde artist and managing editor (of then leading literary magazine, ‘Vindrosen’), as outsider and as institution. He is a writer who likes to take risks, but whose large body of work and continual visibility place him right in the centre of Danish culture.
