Dorthe Nors

Dorthe Nors
Nors at the Göteborg Book Fair, 2015
Nors at the Göteborg Book Fair, 2015
Born (1970-05-20) 20 May 1970 (age 54)
Herning, Denmark
OccupationAuthor
LanguageDanish, English
EducationCand.mag.
Alma materAarhus University
GenreLiterary fiction
Years active2002–present
Website
www.dorthenors.dk
Literature portal

Dorthe Nors (born 20 May 1970) is a Danish writer. She is the author of Soul, Karate Chop, Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, and Wild Swims.

Background

Nors was born in Herning, Denmark, the youngest of three children. As a child, she enjoyed making up stories that her mother, a teacher and painter, would write down and read back to her. At the age of eleven, she began writing her own stories, poems, and plays.[1]

In 1999, Nors graduated from Aarhus University with a degree in literature and art history.[2][3]

Career

Before Nors' literary debut in her own name, she worked as a translator of Swedish crime novels, mostly books by author Johan Theorin.[4]

She made her debut in 2002, with the book Soul, published by Samlerens Forlag.[3] Her English-language following began in 2009, when selections from her short story collection Karate Chop were published in English. She became the first Danish writer to have a story published in The New Yorker, when it printed her story "The Heron" in 2013. In 2015, her first short story collection Karate Chop was published in English alongside So Much for That Winter, a joint publication of her novellas Minna Needs Rehearsal Space and Days.[1] Her second collection of short stories Wild Swims was published in English in 2021 by Graywolf Press.

In 2017, she was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize for her novel Mirror, Shoulder, Signal. Her nonfiction book A Line in the World was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle award in autobiography.[5]

Personal life

Nors lived in Copenhagen for several years before moving back to Jutland in 2013.[1] She has written about not feeling she fits in to Copenhagen's literary scene.[6]

Bibliography

Nonfiction

  • A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast, Graywolf Press (Minneapolis) ISBN 16-444-5209-X

Novels

Short fiction

Collections
Stories[7]
Title Year First published Reprinted/collected Notes
The heron 2013 Nors, Dorthe (9 September 2013). "The heron". The New Yorker.
The freezer chest 2015 Nors, Dorthe (25 May 2015). "The freezer chest". The New Yorker. Vol. 91, no. 14. Translated from the Danish by Misha Hockstra. pp. 64–67.

References

  1. ^ a b c "Dorthe Nors". Current Biography. 79 (2): 73–78. February 2018.
  2. ^ "Nors, Dorthe — Forfatterweb". Retrieved 14 October 2015.
  3. ^ a b "Dorthe Nors". Retrieved 14 October 2015.
  4. ^ Dorthe Nors har en övningslokal Archived 14 September 2015 at the Wayback Machine Göteborgs-Posten. Retrieved 14 October 2015.
  5. ^ Varno, David (1 February 2023). "NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE ANNOUNCES FINALISTS FOR PUBLISHING YEAR 2022". National Book Critics Circle. Retrieved 3 February 2023.
  6. ^ Nors, Dorthe (16 December 2015). "A wolf in Jutland: Dorthe Nors on the writing life in Denmark". The Guardian. Retrieved 24 May 2024. I wanted to be part of the scene, and yet I didn't, after all. I couldn't anyway, and for seven years I sat in Copenhagen, stuck fast like a burr on the back of a cat
  7. ^ Short stories unless otherwise noted.

Further reading

Media related to Dorthe Nors at Wikimedia Commons