Stig Dalager

Danish writer
Stig Dalager (born 1952) is a Danish writer. He is the author of 65 literary works of all kinds, mostly novels and plays, of which several have been translated or staged internationally.

Dalager was born in Copenhagen in the post war period of the 1950s, a time of painful remembrances of the Second World War, continued economic restrictions, and a growing optimism about the future. His parents were grocers throughout the 1950s and 1960s, until his father was struck by Parkinson's disease. He describes his radically changing family structure as he and his two younger brothers moved with their parents to the provincial town of Herning in Jutland, near to where his father had been raised. There he graduated from high school, after which he attended the University of Århus, where he received his master's degree and a Ph. D. in comparative literature. It was there also where he became involved in the student movement of the 1970s. With his then fiancée, Anne Marie Mai, he wrote several books on literature, including a two volume study of Danish women writers from the Middle Ages to contemporary times, "Danske kvindelige forfattere 1 2". In 1982 Dalager left the University of Copenhagen to live as a writer, which he has continued to do since. He has written poetry, fiction (prose), drama, filmscripts and essays. Several of his poems and novels have been translated into other languages, and he has seen his plays staged in Moscow, New York City, Berlin, and other cities. The poetry cycle Århus elegi (Aarhus eulogy) of 1986 was his poetic breakthrough. His most recent collection, Den tynde væg (The thin Wall), was published in 2016. Three of his latest prose works were the novels Journey in blue(about H. C. Andersen) published in 2004 (English 2006), The Labyrinth in 2006 and Land of shadows(about 9/11 in New York) in 2007. Dalager's 2017 novel Kvinde i et århundrede ("Woman in a Century") about the Elisabeth of the Palatinate, and his 2020 Kaos og verden ("Chaos and The World") about Trump's America and AI are his most recent to have been published.

Kærlighed og forræderi, opera libretto for Niels Marthinsen, 1997.