Peter Høeg

Danish · born 1957

Peter Høeg was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, on May 17, 1957. Before settling into writing he moved through an unusually physical run of vocations: he trained as a ballet dancer with the Royal Danish Ballet, worked as an actor, took up fencing and mountaineering, and, amid a personal crisis in the early 1980s, spent a year as a sailor crewing private yachts. He returned to his studies and earned a Master of Arts in Literature from the University of Copenhagen in 1984, under the critic Peter Brask. His first novel, Forestilling om det tyvende århundrede (published in English as The History of Danish Dreams), appeared in 1988 to strong reviews, followed in 1990 by the story collection Fortællinger om natten (Tales of the Night), which reworked Karen Blixen's Gothic inheritance into a bricolage of fables set in her own era. Then came Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne in 1992, published abroad as Smilla's Sense of Snow: a Greenlandic-Danish scientist's investigation into a child's death that became an international sensation, named a book of the year by both Time and Entertainment Weekly, translated into more than seventeen languages, and adapted into a 1997 film directed by Bille August. Borderliners followed in 1993 and won Denmark's Golden Laurel and Critics Prize for Literature. Uneasy with the fame Smilla brought him, Høeg pulled back from public life after his next novel, The Woman and the Ape (1996), met a cooler reception, the same year he founded the Lolwe foundation to fund aid for women and children in the developing world. He broke a decade of public silence with The Quiet Girl in 2006, then published The Elephant Keepers' Children in 2010, The Susan Effect in 2014, and Gennem dine øjne (Through Your Eyes) in 2018. He is the father of four children and now lives in Nørre Snede, in Jutland, still guarding the privacy he decided, after Smilla, that fame would otherwise cost him.