Portrait of a Young Man

Niels Frank, born 1963, published his first book in 1985, a collection of poems called Øjeblikket (The Moment). Since then he has published five books of poems, the latest being Små guder (Small Gods) in 2008. He has also published two books of essays, the latest being Alt andet er løgn (Everything Else is a Lie) from 2007. In 1998 he invented his own genre called metaphorisms in Livet i troperne (Life in the Tropics) which he expanded with new texts as well as photographs in the four-hundred-page book Første person, anden person (First Person, Second Person), published in 2004. He has also written a book of art stories about fifteen well-known artists such as Pablo Picasso, Leonardo da Vinci, Andy Warhol, Albrecht Dürer, and Frida Kahlo. In 2010 he published Spørgespil (Who’s Asking), a prose collection of answers to various questions posed by the writer himself, inspired by Marcel Proust’s famous questionnaire. His first novel, Nellies bog (Nellie’s Book), was published in 2013, written apparently by the protagonist himself despite his great difficulties in writing correctly. It received an award from the Danish Critics Prize as book of the year. In 2015 he published Tristhedens historie (The History of Sadness) a collection of ten portraits of various characters who share the experience of lost hopes and unfulfilled dreams. Vulkaner på månen (Volcanoes on the Moon), a collection of stories about various cities around the world, came out in 2018. Frank is represented in New European Poets, an American anthology published in 2008. In 2011, his poetry collection Én vej from 2005 was translated into English and published in Canada under the title Picture World. He has translated poetry into Danish, notably that of John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Francis Ponge, and Paul Celan. From 1996 to 2002 he was head of the Writers’ School in Copenhagen. In 2009 he received a lifetime award from the Danish state.