Tove Ditlevsen

Tove Irma Margit Ditlevsen, best known for her three-volume memoir The Copenhagen Trilogy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021) was born on December 14, 1917, in Copenhagen to Ditlev Ditlevsen, a coal stoker, and Alfrida Ditlevsen (née Mundus). Ditlevsen was raised in Vesterbro, a low-income and working-class section of Copenhagen. She stopped attending school in her teens and took on a series of jobs to help her family financially. She worked as a housekeeper at a boardinghouse, a clerk, a secretary, and an assistant at a law office. 

Ditlevsen began publishing poetry in literary journals when she was in her early twenties. She published her first poem in the Danish journal Vild Hvede [Wild Wheat] in 1937. The editor of that journal, Viggo F. Møller, became her first husband. She published her first full-length collection of poetry, A Girl’s Mind, in 1939 to acclaim. Subsequently, Ditlevsen became extraordinarily prolific, producing a book either every year or every other year until her death, including the publication of numerous articles and an advice column in the women’s weekly Familie Journalen. She was given De Gyldne Laurbær [The Golden Laurel] prize, a once-in-a-lifetime Danish literature award bestowed by booksellers, in 1955, the same year in which she published her fourth poetry collection, A Woman’s Mind. 

Ditlevsen published thirty books during her lifetime, including eleven books of poetry, seven novels, and four collections of short stories. She had been one of Denmark’s most popular writers but little known elsewhere until the publication of her trilogy of memoirs in the late 1960s and early 1970s: Barndom [Childhood], Ungdom [Youth], and Gift [Dependency]. The books have been translated into approximately thirty languages. The final book in the series chronicles her addiction to opioids—a dependency that was encouraged by her third husband, a physician. Ditlevsen nearly died before seeking treatment. 

Ditlevsen died of suicide in Copenhagen on March 7, 1976. Despite her popularity in Denmark, her work was largely disregarded by the country’s literary establishment and, thus, did not become part of the Danish canon until 2014. In 2025, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die: Selected Poems. Translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, it is the first collection of Ditlevsen’s poems to be translated into English. Previously, only individual poems appeared in translation in literary journals and anthologies.