Pulitzer prize-winning author Jeffrey Eugenides began writing his latest book in the usual haphazard way – he was writing a completely different book at the time. “There was something I didn’t like about it,” he told his audience at Louisiana Literature, which he participated in over the weekend. “It felt wooden and old and smelled like a second-hand couch.” This year’s edition is the third time the international book festival has been held, celebrating literature and storytelling against the art gallery’s spectacular backdrop. This year’s line-up was nothing short of impressive. Patti Smith, Kiran Desai, Jonathan Saffran Foer, Cesar Aira and Jeffrey Eugenides were some of the international names who attended the four day-event. This bookworm’s first stop was rocker Patti Smith. Smith walked out onto the park stage with rounded shoulders. Her wild, knotty hair protruded from beneath a woollen hat. Her fingerless-gloved hands clutched the all-too familiar microphone. Now 65 years old, the singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist still feels like the punk crusader she was in 1975 when her acclaimed debut ‘Horses’ was released. “No matter whether I’m washing up or looking after my kids, I’m still the girl who can put her foot through the amplifier,” she told the crowd gathered on the Louisiana lawn. Smith read aloud from her memoir ‘Just Kids’, which took the US National Book Award for non-fiction in 2010. She spoke about being raised in a town of fields and pig farms, where the cultural centre point was in her family home – a house full of books. “I would say I have spent over half of my life reading,” Smith said. She wrote her book to give something back to the literary world, and to honour her former lover and friend, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. It took her 20 years. Revisiting New York’s beat poetry scene, interviewer Christian Lund asked Smith to read a poem with her long-term guitarist, Lenny Kaye. Kaye played and Smith sang a poem in memory of Jim Morrison. It was the same performance they had done in a church 45 years earlier as a part of the St Mark’s Poetry Project. It was a controversial performance back then, and Smith said half the crowd had loved it and the other half had wanted her arrested for desecrating the church. “But that’s not so unfamiliar these days,” she said, referring to Pussy Riot’s punk prayer. Venturing indoors, Jeffrey Eugenides – author of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize winner ‘Middlesex’, and also ‘The Virgin Suicides’ – explained his latest attempt to reinvent the wedding plot in a book unimaginatively entitled ‘The Marriage Plot’. Drawing on the works of his favourite classic authors like Henry James, Gustave Flaubert and Leo Tolstoy, Eugenides has tried to breathe new life into old themes. The passage he read aloud depicted a couple falling in love in their early 20s. The male character asked his lover why she never “took a dump” at his place. Anna Karenina probably took a dump every now and again too, but no-one really talked about it. On a more cultured note, another US-based writer, Kiran Desai, talked about notions of belonging and dislocation, as explored in her 2006 Booker Prize-winning novel, ‘The Inheritance of Loss’. Born and bred in India, Desai explained that she had to undergo the process of dislocation to become an author there. After all, the novel was an English tradition introduced to India during colonial times. “We loved our dogs like a British person loves their dogs … We would eat a tuna fish with cheese sauce,” she said. It has been a long time since Desai’s last book, but she is midway through writing a new one. She has written 4,000 pages – about 3,600 too many and describes the anxiety she feels every single writing day. It was a message for the writers among us to take home: prize-winning authors are human too. They experience moments of doubt, frustration and anger. They bin their books and start over. But they persist. And our bookshelves are all the better nourished because of it.
A weekend spent in the company of literary giants
In has taken just three years for Louisiana Literature to become Denmark’s most prestigious international book festival
“We need more than words”: INDE wants to be a new voice for internationals in Denmark
Elizabeth Williams Ørberg is president of INDE—Internationals in Denmark—a grassroots organization formed in response to the growing need for international voices in Danish society. In this interview, she discusses the organization’s origins, mission, and her own 20+ year journey as an international in Denmark.
“You don’t have to do it all on your own”: Ifeoma Okpala Aina of ProWoc on creating community and visibility for internationals in Denmark
Ifeoma Okpala Aina, President of ProWoc (Professional Women of Color), shares how the organization helped her build community, support other women, and push for greater visibility and inclusion in Denmark’s professional and social spheres.
Beyond difference: building a community in Denmark
The Brotherhood for Professionals of Color has spent 18 months creating safe spaces for connection, mentoring, and empowerment—without asking for more than respect
This rural town in Denmark has a 17 percent international workforce — Here’s how
With a low unemployment rate and aging population, the municipality is actively recruiting workers from abroad to fill essential roles and support long-term growth
How international really is the leadership of the C25 companies?
The 25 largest publicly listed companies in Denmark, all represented under the C25 index, have shown a recurring trend among its leaders: about 33% of these companies’ Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) are internationals
Where did my donation go? The ethical gap in modern humanitarian crowdfunding
What happens after you make a donation to humanitarian organizations is often complex—and not very visible. This presents a challenge not only for charities but for the entire ecosystem of modern giving, writes Ali Al Mokdad
Connect Club is your gateway to a vibrant programme of events and an international community in Denmark.
Career
This rural town in Denmark has a 17 percent international workforce — Here’s how
With a low unemployment rate and aging population, the municipality is actively recruiting workers from abroad to fill essential roles and support long-term growth
How international really is the leadership of the C25 companies?
The 25 largest publicly listed companies in Denmark, all represented under the C25 index, have shown a recurring trend among its leaders: about 33% of these companies’ Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) are internationals
The net migration of internationals from many countries is declining
Data analyst Kelly Rasmussen analyzes how internationals from different nationalities have varying retention rates in Denmark. Her calculations cover the last decades and show how people from wealthier democracies tend to leave more than others