The Land of Short Sentences

• Our first Danish author, Stine Pilgaard is one of the most original, humorous and sharp voices in Scandinavian literature.

• Stine Pilgaard is fascinated by people and the way people talk to each other and talk past each other. Her novels focus on scenes from everyday life, community and the way people fit in, or don’t.

• In one of her novels, the narrator says: "I walk through the world with popcorn and cola, the public space is my cinema." Her books take the same voyeuristic approach

• A young mother follows her husband to a rural community in West Jutland, Denmark, where he teaches at the local High School. Isolated, she is forced to find her way in a bewildering community and in the inscrutable conversational forms of the local population.

• This title captures the isolation of young motherhood brilliantly and takes an humorous outsider’s view of the local community: strong-willed, rough around the edges with their strange conversational skills featuring short sentences and long silences.

• As the lonely young mother starts to settle in, she takes on the job of writing an advice column for a small-town paper

• The title mixes different text forms by including letters to the newspaper and the printed answer, as well as song texts

• The novel was a commercial hit in Denmark over the 2020 summer, staying at number one for several months.

• From the translator: The satirical portrait of a cloyingly idealistic community is steeped in affection. It dives headfirst into the agonies of caring for a baby, but the ecstasies are present as well. The negotiations and tribulations of coupledom (At what point does a trash bag become too full? What if your partner corrects you too often?) are described with an almost uncanny perceptiveness. Perhaps most of all, it tenderly illustrates the desperation of everyday loneliness, and the absurd lengths we go for human connection.

• A note on the setting: The novel revolves around a particularly Danish adult education institution called a højskole, or Folk High School. Folk high schools are institutions for adult education that generally do not grant academic degrees. They are most commonly found in Nordic countries and in Germany, Switzerland and Austria and in Denmark are typically attended by younger adults, largely between age 18 to 25, who are looking to deepen their skills in a certain field (music, sports, design, etc.)

Stine Pilgaard is a graduate of the Danish Writers’ Academy and the University of Copenhagen. Her first novel, Min mor siger (“My Mother Says”), was a critical and commercial success, earning a nomination for the prestigious Danish Broadcasting Corporation Literature Prize and securing its author the Bodil and Jørgen Munch-Christensen Award for a debut author. In 2016, Pilgaard received the Danish Libraries’ Writers Award and was nominated for the Danish Readers’ Book Award for Lejlighedssange (“Songs for Special Occasions”). The Land of Short Sentences was an instant bestseller in Denmark, where it was released to critical acclaim. Pilgaard hails from the city of Aarhus and lives in Velling, an outlying rural community close to Ringkøbing in Jutland, Denmark.

Hunter Simpson is originally from North Carolina and lives in Copenhagen, Denmark. Stine Pilgaard’s The Land of Short Sentences (World Editions, 2022) was his first published literary translation and won Scandinavian American Foundation’s Leif and Inger Sjöberg Prize for 2021. My Mother Says will be his second published translation.