Stig Dalager

Stig Dalager’s personal maxim as a Danish writer is essentially to stand up and be counted, to use his literature as a defensive weapon in the services of mankind and thereby step into the role of a committed artist who faces up to modern society and analyses its origins and the consequences. More specifically, Dalager’s themes in prose, poetry and particularly drama revolve around the loner facing the quirks, caprices and demands of the great world outside. The small story with an eye to the larger destiny, the mechanisms of world history and the fundamental human condition.

In the novel To dage i juli (Two Days in July) (2002) Stig Dalager writes a completely different history, yet once again it is based on his theme of the individual and world history, but in the context of the failed Stauffenberg plot against Hitler in July 1944.

Dalager’s next historical novel Rejse I blåt (Journey in Blue) came out in 2004; it is about Hans Christian Andersen, the fairy tale writer, who is on his death bed watching his life pass before him.

In addition, I should mention Dalager’s novel for young adults, Davids bog (David’s Book) (1995), about the experiences of a young Jewish boy during the holocaust of WWII. Although intended for younger readers it can be read and enjoyed by all; it is a deeply disturbing document about monstrous inhumanity and the lone individual exposed to systematic brutality.

Then in 2005 Stig Dalager’s novel Labyrinten (The Maze) was published. Again it is a partly historical novel, rooted in both fact and fiction. This time a Danish-American lawyer hunts down an Austrian Nazi war criminal who at the time escaped the inferno. The novel shifts between portraits of Vienna in the mid 1990s and the Austrian capital in Hitler’s Third Reich. However, the novel is also about developments in a central Europe which has still not come to terms with its dark past as the womb, the cradle and the armoury of Nazism. Generally, it is true to say that a clear, unmistakeable protest shines out in everything Dalager writes, against a world without mercy, wars which take no prisoners and democratic societies which do not respect their own political rules.

Apart from being a novelist, Stig Dalager is an important dramatist who has enjoyed success at home and abroad.