Biography
Inger Christensen was born in Vejle in 1935, the daughter of a tailor and a cook, and qualified as a teacher at the teachers' college in Aarhus in 1958. She settled in Copenhagen in 1962 and, after teaching at an art college in Holbæk (1963–1964), became a full-time writer; from 1959 to 1976 she was married to the poet Poul Borum. Following the poetry collections Lys (1962) and Græs (1963) and the novels Evighedsmaskinen (1964) and Azorno (1967), she published the long poem det in 1969. It was followed in 1981 by alfabet, whose structure obeys the Fibonacci sequence, and in 1991 by the sonnet sequence Sommerfugledalen; she also wrote children's books, plays, radio plays and essays. Her honours include the Nordic Prize of the Swedish Academy and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (both 1994) and the European Poetry Prize (1995); she was a member of the Danish Academy and, from 2001, of the Berlin Academy of Arts, and was often named as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her German translations are chiefly by Hanns Grössel. Christensen died in Copenhagen in 2009.
On Stagelog
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