Karen Marie Edelfeldt

1971 -

Denmark

Karen Marie Edelfeldt is self-taught, having travelled extensively and worked in a host of different occupations. Her debut collection tysh, 1989, brought her big success at the early age of seventeen, and she was awarded the Klaus Rifbjerg Prize for debut authors by Det Danske Akademi (the Danish academy of language and literature). Since then, she has been awarded the Michael Strunge Prize for her writing, which also includes the poetry collection Paradis, 1992, and Til Babylon, 1995.

Her poetry is expressive. She works with a connected and disconnected form, which is an approximation of the identifications and role models of the female first person and, not least, her horror of modern life’s exploitation of nature and the suppression of the body and pleasure. In a whirlwind, she writes about the loss of orientation of the first person in poems structured by the fragments and edges of language and tough, impervious images. In the world of the verse and poem, the first person appears to escape to examine and pursue happiness, anger, and sorrow. Her collection Til Babylon refers to the Prophecy of the Sibyl, the Babylonian tales, and to The Bible in its reflections circling the image of a dead child and a mourning first person, who seeks out the dead and the limbo of the infant to get close to the child. Her poems break up the old, poetic symbolisation of the female as reconciliation and inspiration and present new, unexpected post-Romantic image patterns.

Additions by the editorial team 2011:

The above biography was first published in 1998. Since then, Karen Marie Edelfeldt has written the poetry collection Sollyset i åbne hænder, 2005.