Jacob Ejersbo

Jakob Ejersbo (born April 6, 1968 in Rødovre , † July 10, 2008 in Aalborg ) was a Danish writer .

life and work

Ejersbo grew up in different places in Denmark and Tanzania . His high school diploma in Aalborg in 1988 was followed by a number of restless years, during which he took odd jobs in factories and road construction, worked as a waiter and briefly studied at university. He completed his training at the Danish Journalist College ( Danmarks Journalisthøjskole ) in Aarhus in 1995. He then worked for various radio stations and the daily newspaper Aktuelt, which is closely related to the trade union federation .

In 1998, Jakob Ejersbo and his friend Morten Alsinger published their first literary work, the epistolary novel Fuga . At first he couldn't find a publisher for a volume with short stories , which he named Superego . The book was eventually published by the renowned publishing house Gyldendal and received several positive reviews.

Ejersbo's breakthrough came in 2002 with the 400-page novel Nordkraft , which is set in the milieu of petty criminals, dealers and drug addicts in Aalborg. With the book, Ejersbo demonstratively moved away from the Danish aesthetic of the 1990s, which was characterized by intellectual experimentation, a sometimes ironic minimalism and a renaissance of short prose . In three large chapters, with three different narrators, it tells of children of the 68 generation who no longer share their parents' ideals and who refuse to grow up. The biographies, which are depicted drastically and without make-up, and not without poetic elements, reveal the careful research of the trained journalist. Danish reviewers particularly highlighted the book's authentic language, infused with gruff slang . Ejersbo himself referred to the tradition of realism in the 20th century in interviews and settled his literature in the vicinity of authors such as Erich Maria Remarque , Ernest Hemingway , Erskine Caldwell and Flannery O'Connor .

Nordkraft achieved an unusually high circulation of over 100,000 copies in Denmark and has been translated into several languages, including German. The country's booksellers awarded him the De Gyldne Laurbær (Golden Laurel) award in 2002 . In spring 2005, Ole Christian Madsen's adaptation of the novel was released in Danish cinemas.

Jakob Ejersbo died in July 2008 after suffering from cancer for a long time . He left behind several manuscripts, including an almost completed 700-page novel trilogy that was published in Denmark in 2009 and also in Germany in 2011/2012.

bibliography

Original editions

• Fuga (with Morten Alsinger, 1998)
• Superego (2000)
• Nordkraft (2002)
• Africa trilogy:
  • Liberty (2009)
  • Eksil (2009)
  • Revolution (2009)

Translations

• North force . Translated from the Danish by Sigrid Engeler. DuMont-Literatur-und-Kunst-Verlag, Cologne 2004, ISBN 3-8321-7844-9 .
• Liberty . From the Danish by Ulrich Sonnenberg . btb, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-442-75286-7
• Exile . From the Danish by Ulrich Sonnenberg. btb, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-442-75288-1
• Revolution . From the Danish by Ulrich Sonnenberg. btb, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-442-75287-4

Web links

Portrait in the daily newspaper Politiken on the occasion of the 40th birthday of Jakob Ejersbo (Danish)