Henrik Pontoppidan

One of sixteen children in a Jutland parsonage whose piety he came to see as gloom, Pontoppidan fled to Copenhagen to train as an engineer, abandoned the profession on the eve of his final exams, and spent years teaching and writing journalism among smallholders: the ground truth of his fiction.

He became the great novelist of Denmark's Modern Breakthrough: three vast chronicles (The Promised Land, Lucky Per (1898–1904), The Realm of the Dead) that together audit half a century of Danish illusions, religious, political, and romantic. Lucky Per's Per Sidenius, conqueror of Copenhagen who ends alone by choice on a windswept heath, is his double and his verdict.

The 1917 Nobel, shared with Gjellerup, honored his 'authentic descriptions of present-day life in Denmark'; Thomas Mann and Lukács admired him, and English translation finally arrived a century late, in 2010.