In English
Born in 1969, Trine Andersen holds a master’s degree in literature from the University of Southern Denmark, 1996.
Her first book – a collection of short stories called Hotel Malheureux – was published in 1995 and won both the 1995 First Book Prize and an award from the Danish Arts Foundation. Since then she has written poetry, novels and more short stories, as well as some literature for children.
Movement, in life as in writing, is important to the author. But although she may change the topic, the tone, the genre the difficulty of defining the truth is at the heart of her work.
In one of her novels, The Right Mind of Elinor Mark, a woman of 87 disappears from her nursing home. Is it simply a case of an old and forgetful woman getting lost, or is there more to it? In the novel Complex we follow three different characters investigating the same events over and over.
In her latest work, the short story collection, Four tales about love, we are in the near future in a world falling apart. In the midst of chaos people still have their ordinary lives to live; a man comes to turns with his divorce, a mother says goodbye to her grown up son, a tourist misbehaves in Kabul, a refugee in a camp in Eritrea is hit by lightning and is forced to revise her beliefs on love and friendship.
“How wonderful this is! She is an angry bitch, no doubt, but good grief, she can write a poem. To write a lasting classic as your first book of poetry, that is not something that just anyone can do. I have read the book over and over in delight.”
(Poet and critic F. P. Jac, in the daily paper Ekstra Bladet, on The New World, Trine Andersens first collection of poetry).
“These four harsh tales effectively clears away the dust. We are left with a raw reality turning the readers’ expectations as well as the order of the world upside down.”
(Britta Riis Langdahl, in the magazine Litteratursiden, on Four tales about love).
In 2008 Trine received the 3-year-grant from the Danish Arts Foundation.
In 2011 another of her collections of short stories – We don’t know yet – won an award from the Danish Arts Foundation.
In 2012 she was given the Authors’ Prize of Honour by the Danish Authors Association.
In 2016 she was a Literary Arts Resident at Rockefeller Foundations’ Bellagio Centre in Italy.