Tove Ditlevsen

Ditlevsen grew up in a working-class tenement in Copenhagen's Vesterbro district, left school at fourteen, and worked as a maid and errand girl while writing poetry in secret, publishing her first collection at twenty-two. She married four times; her third husband, a doctor, fed her addiction to opioids under cover of legitimate prescriptions, an entrapment she rendered with clear-eyed precision in Dependency, whose Danish title, Gift, means both 'married' and 'poison.'

The Copenhagen Trilogy (Childhood, Youth, and Dependency, published across the 1960s and 70s) traced her path from a bookish, unloved girl to a celebrated poet to a woman cycling through institutions and rehabilitation for her addiction, all without asking for the reader's forgiveness or pity. Long out of print in English, the trilogy was rediscovered and retranslated decades after her death by suicide in Copenhagen in 1976, finding the wide readership it had been denied in her lifetime.