Katrine Marie Guldager

Katrine Marie Guldager’s success is remarkable. She’s popular among critics and readers alike, her books are printed in several editions both in Denmark and abroad, and she’s also one of the most experimental writers of her (90s) generation.

The reason she manages to do both – write experimentalist fiction and have a wide audience – is that her work is characterized by a truly original voice. It is a voice that mixes the ordinary and the peculiar with the effect that underneath the smooth surface of normality runs a current of irony, and this subversive irony is the one common denominator of her versatile work. Since her debut in 1994, Dagene skifter hænder (The Days Change Hands), her work has spread across and in-between the literary genres – from prose-like poems to lyrical novels, from short novellas to book-long poems, from children’s books and radio plays to collections of short stories that read like novels.

Thematically, her books are about exile and disintegration, but the authorship has evolved from a concern with the alienation of self and linguistic exile in Styrt (Crash) and Blank (Blank) to an exploration of fragmentation and alienation on a broader, societal level in Ankomst, Husumgade (Arrival at Husumgade) and Rejsen til Kicdolqimikk (Journey to Kicdolqimikk). In København (Copenhagen) Guldager uses the city’s public space as a showcase for its selfish and self-righteous citizens who can’t establish proper relations to one another – not even when they meet and their stories entangle, as they do in Guldager’s collection of stories.

Guldager’s more recent work has a social-critical quality to it, but the authorship is too multifarious and her voice is too ambiguous to call her a “political” writer. Guldager’s interest is first and foremost language and its many (side) effects – a narrow interest to which she has given so popular a form that she is today one of Denmark’s most important and most widely read writers from the nineties.