The number of internationals who found fame after moving to the Danish capital is a steadily growing list.
There’s Paul Gauguin, the celebrated French artist, who lived here with his Danish wife briefly in the 1880s. And Joseph Oppenheimer, the American documentarist who hit the big time with ‘The Act of Killing’, who has lived in Copenhagen since 2010. And British cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, an Oscar winner for ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, who has been living on and off in Denmark since 1983.
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Scrubbing dishes in Christiania
And now you can add the name Gregory Pardlo to that list. Earlier this week, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for the book ‘Digest‘, and it emerges that he lived in Copenhagen for five years in the early to mid-1990s, writing a number of poems about life in the city.
In various media reports in the States this week, it is revealed that he spent most of his time working in a restaurant, and that he managed to learn Danish – to such a proficiency that he translated ‘Pencil of Rays and Spike Mace’, a collection of poetry by Niels Lyngsø.
According to one of his poems, ‘Copenhagen 1995’, the restaurant in question could have been Spiseloppen in Christiania, which was founded in the early 1990s.
