Louis Jensen: Author – Denmark

We are forever inspired by longing and we continually look for it in the stories we read, both as children and as adults.

Jensen L.

louis jensen was born in northern Jutland, in 1943. His family moved south when he was twelve years old, but he never lost his connection to the fjords and seabirds that dominated the landscape; they are present in all his books. Until a few years ago, Jensen earned his living as an architect and city planner for the city of Aarhus. Today, Jensen is so successful that he can support himself and his family with his writing income alone.

As a child, Jensen was a prolific reader and quickly advanced his way through the small local library beginning with fairy tales and eventually venturing into the adult section. He read Hans Christian Andersen along with Jung and Steiner, and his favorite book is Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. For Jensen, the fairy tale was one of the most important genres, and many of his stories carry themes similar to those found in Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”—such as travelling away, discovering oneself, finding love, and returning home.

Like an architect would design a building, Jensen’s stories are carefully constructed. In his ongoing collection called Hundrede firkantede historier (A Hundred Square Stories, 1992), even the layout of the story on the page is manipulated into a square or rectangle. Another skill exhibited in Jensen’s carefully constructed writing is his ability to convince his readers that not only humans and animals can have feelings and motives but so can gigantic letters, detached body parts, and even slices of bread.

In addition, the subtle messages in his stories are naturally appealing to children without pandering or feeling like educational texts. For example, 2 kroner og 25 øre (2 Crowns and 25 Øre, 2010) highlights the evils of starvation and compels the fourteen-year-old protagonist to become a modern-day Robin Hood and collect money—both legally and illegally—to fight this evil.

Jensen has received many awards for his books. He has been nominated for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award eight times (2004–2010 and 2014), and this is his third nomination for the Hans Christian Andersen Award (2000, 2010, and 2016). In addition, he has received working grants from the Danish Ministry of Culture seven times between 1990 and 2001.