About Tove Ditlevsen
“If you can't write about and for people, then about and for whom on earth should you write?”
- quote by Tove Ditlevsen from Tove Ditlevsen, the biography by Jens Andersen
Tove Irma Margit Ditlevsen was born on December 14, 1917, in Copenhagen. Yet for her entire adult life, Tove acted as if she had been born a year later, on December 14, 1918. There are various explanations for her precise reason for this, but above all it shows Tove's way of bending life to her will.
12 October 2026
Written by Rinke Brans
Tove grew up in the working-class milieu of Vesterbro, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Copenhagen. People lived close together, work was often uncertain, and alcohol abuse and violence were part of everyday life. Tove felt out of place both in the neighborhood and within her family, always an outsider. Her brother was handsome, she was ugly. Her brother would become a craftsman, she wanted to be a poet, but “girls can't become poets,” her father always said. Even so, after much nagging, her parents gave her a poetry album, in which she could finally put the words in her head down on paper. In Childhood, she writes: "One day I will write down all the words that flow through me. One day other people will read them in a book and be amazed that a girl can become a poet after all.”
Tove wants to become an author
As a teenager, Tove already knows she wants to get away from the place where she grew up. She hopes to rise above her parents' circumstances, and has a clear path in mind for doing so: she wants to become a writer. In her poetry album, she writes poems and songs of devotion for colleagues at her part-time job at the lithographic printing works. After a number of attempts, she finds her way into the world of literature: she gets the contact details of Viggo F. Møller, editor of the literary magazine Vild Hvede ('Wild Wheat'). She sends him three poems, of which he decides to publish one. He also invites her to dinner, where he offers to help her publish her first poetry collection. Tove can hardly contain her happiness. “I feel like throwing my arms around his neck, as if I'm very tired after a long, long journey and have finally come home,” she writes in Youth. She is so happy that she decides to marry Viggo.
"I've written about my whole life. I never spared myself! Writing is compromising yourself, otherwise it isn't art."
And Tove became an author
In 1939, when Tove was 21 years old, her first poetry collection was published, titled Pigesind ('Girl's Mind'). The collection was immediately well received, and marked the start of Tove's life as a published writer. In total, she wrote thirty books and poetry collections, and for years she also had a column in Familie Journalen, where she gave housewives, mothers, and wives candid advice on both everyday problems and bigger questions about life. By then she was a celebrity in Denmark and a much-discussed guest at literary events. Her books were read by a large audience, although at the time the literary world dismissed them as 'women's literature.'
Tove wants the perfect picture
Besides becoming a writer, Tove also had a great wish to be ‘normal,’ that is, to have a husband, a house, and children. Throughout her life, she made several attempts to attain that ideal picture. It resulted in four marriages and three children, each with a different father. It was during her marriage to her third husband that Tove developed an addiction to painkillers. Carl was a medical school graduate who sedated her with pethidine while performing a curettage. Tove is overwhelmed by the heavenly feeling it gives her, and decides never to let go of the man who gave her this feeling. She leaves the father of her first child and moves in with Carl, who regularly administers pethidine, butalgin, and chloral to her.
Writing is life
In the early 1960s, Tove is admitted to a clinic. Drug abuse has broken her physically and mentally. In the four years that follow, the focus is on recovery and she hardly writes. In the calm, stable environment of the clinic, she finds her way back to literature. Her attending physician is at first astonished that Ditlevsen has had a typewriter delivered to her room, but Tove soon proves that writing will be her way out of this state. “In the morning there was hope,” Tove wrote, the first sentence of Childhood, and it didn't stop there. In the psychiatric institution, she wrote the first four pages of what would become her great comeback in Danish literature: The Copenhagen Trilogy. In 1967 she wrote both Childhood and Youth, and in 1971 Dependency followed. In 2019, 43 years after Tove's death, the three books became an international hit under the collective title The Copenhagen Trilogy.
"We didn't decide for ourselves that we wanted to come into the world, so let us decide when we want to leave it."
Until the end of her life, Tove struggled with her addiction to medication and stayed several times in clinics and psychiatric institutions, something she wrote about candidly in her later novels. In the early 1970s, she made several suicide attempts. Death had been a theme in her life since childhood, as well as in her novels and poems, and also in public debate. A year before her death, she wrote in the Norwegian newspaper Morgenposten: "We didn't decide for ourselves that we wanted to come into the world, so let us decide when we want to leave it."
In March 1976, Tove was found dead after taking an excessive amount of sleeping medication. In the letters she left to her daughter Helle, she had described exactly how she wanted her funeral to go. In this way, Tove kept control even after her death.
Eline Arbo has created a personal adaptation of Tove Ditlevsen's work. For a reason. Curious? Then read the interview with her.
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