The conversation led by writer Hanne Højgaard Viemose will be in Danish.
Theis Ørntoft (1984) is a poet and novelist. He has studied literature, graduated from Forfatterskolen and has received prestigious Danish awards: Munch-Christensen’s Culture Grant, the Michael Strunge Award and Klaus Rifbjerg’s Debut Award.
Ørntoft debuted with his naughty and stylish poetry collection Yeahsuiten(2009). The poems are characterized by attitude and youthful supremacy, and Ørntoft draws on the youth’s language usage, everyday life and cultural references. He combines the youth culture with a literary-historical consciousness, which is also seen in his poetry collection Digte 2014, where he again draws on some of the literary history’s heavy boys, e.g. Adam Oehlenschläger and Johannes V. Jensen. Ørntoft has truly established his name as one of the great voices within the newer Danish poetry. But both in Digte 2014 and the debut novel Solar (2018), the naughty and youthful, however, are replaced by feelings of powerlessness and subversion. His auto fictive novel is about a poet named Theis, who moves cynically observing through a messy and rootless life, first on the ancient Danish road Hærvejen, later in Copenhagen’s nightlife and even later in Southern Europe’s rogue bodegas. A desperate, dystopian generation novel and a hallucinated road trip.