Tom Kristensen

Over a 50 year career, Kristensen achieved both critical and popular success as a poet, critic and author. Releasing his first collection of poetry in 1920, he was known as the 'poet of anxiety,' and indeed, one of his best known works is the poem'Angst', part of which features in his 1930 novel, Havoc.
Something of a scandal upon its release, the book is today considered a masterpiece of European modernism.

Born in London, but growing up in the working class milieu of Copenhagen, Kristensen travelled in the Orient and Spain. He worked in Copenhagen, as literary critic at the newspaper Politiken, from 1923. However, upon the death of his third wife (of five) from a combination of alcohol and pills, he left the city in the 1940s to settle on the island of Thurø, where he lived until his own death in 1974.

Kristensen is one of the most respected and loved members of the Danish literary canon. It is with great pleasure and pride that Nordisk Books has published Havoc for the first time in the UK.