‘My roots are in the landscape, in the wild’

The Danish author’s anthology of 14 short stories offers crisp everyday glimpses of Nordic life

1 Tell us about your relationship with nature and writing.

There’s a strong connection and I believe it gets stronger as I get older. I grew up in a vast landscape but moved to the big city when I was young. Over the years, I seemed more and more drawn back to nature, as if I wanted to return home, or just stop pretending to be “a proper and fully urbanised individual”. I can see that development in my literature. I love being in the wilderness. It’s natural to me. It’s how I grew up. It’s in my bones, and it’s in my way of sensing the world.

2 What are your thoughts on the Danish word hygge, which has been used and reused to promote commodities?

Well, the brand hygge, that is used to sell commodities, ideas, and a specific image of Danish coolness, is only the surface of the social construction and control mechanism that hygge is in real life. Hygge is very much about keeping the surface intact and excluding everything that will spoil the hygge.

I love to hygge, don’t get me wrong. But as a Dane I also know that there are darker things hiding beneath the surface of the word. In Wild Swims there’s a story called Hygge. It’s based on a sentence I read in a newspaper once. A man who had murdered his girlfriend was asked why he did it, and he answered: “I don’t know. One minute we were sitting on the couch hygging, and the next minute she lay dead on the floor.” The sentence seemed to reveal how short a route there is from that perfect surface — to something that is very uncanny. By the way: that which is very uncanny, is called uhyggelig, in Danish!

3 Who are your favourite Nordic authors?

I grew up reading a lot of Hans Christian Andersen and Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren. When I grew older, I fell in love with the poetry of Tove Ditlevsen. I started studying Nordic literature at the University of Aarhus when I was 20 and fell in love with Swedish literature. Read a lot of Kerstin Ekman, Per Olov Enquist, August Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman. My thesis was on Swedish literature.

4 Tell us about your next book.

I just published a book called North Sea about how I moved to the North Sea shoreline, and what that place means to my life, my memory and what the connection between identity and a place is. Like the Vikings, I am a very rooted person but with a strong international longing. I’m still launching Wild Swims in Denmark, but when fall comes, I will be writing a novel.