Louis Jensen

The Danish author Louis Jensen (19 July 1943 – 4 March 2021) was an Innovator in the international literary trends of Flash fiction, metafiction, prose poetry, and magical realism.

While he published more than 90 books for both adults and children, he was best known for his children's books, which include picture books, short stories, Flash fiction, creative nonfiction and novels.

His work is characterized by Wordplay and playful experiments in form and structure, which have led critics to draw comparisons to Borges, Calvino, Gogol, and the poetry of the Oulipo movement.

His work is also rooted in the fairy tale and folk tale tradition, and is deeply influenced by the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen.

He published his first poem in 1970 in the literary magazine "Hvedekorn," and his first book of poetry in 1972.

His first novel for young readers, "Krystalmanden" (The Crystal Man), was published in 1986.

In 1992, Jensen published the first volume of 100 stories in his "Square Story" project.

Over the course of the next 24 years, he accomplished his goal of writing 1001 of these very short stories, each in the shape of a square.

Beginning in 1992, he worked full-time as an author.

He lived in Aarhus, Denmark, with his wife, the painter Elisabeth Wegger.

He had three grown children, and several grandchildren.

He died in Aarhus on March 4, 2021, after suffering a heart attack while bicycling with friends.

The Square Stories are Louis Jensen's invented literary form: very short microfictions, formatted in the shape of a square block of text, and printed one to a page.

Jensen published ten collections of 100 stories.

With the eleventh and final book in the series, which includes 100 pictures and one story, Jensen reached his goal of producing 1001 stories.

The 1001 square stories share several formal features.

They are all brief, generally 100 words or less, and they are all squares (with the exception of one triangular story in the fourth volume).

The stories are each numbered—not on the page, but within the story itself.

The first begins "engang der var," or "once there was," a variation on the traditional opening of a Danish fairy tale "der var engang," which is the equivalent of the English "once upon a time."

The stories that follow each have their own number: a second time there was, a third time, and so on, all the way up to "a one thousand and first time there was."

Each of the ten published volumes of stories also includes a final, unnumbered story, that begins "en helt anden gang," or, "another time altogether."

According to translator and critic Lise Kildegaard, the enumeration of the stories "has a complex effect on the reader's experience."

In 2002, he was chosen by the Danish National Art Foundation to be included on the roster of 275 Danish artists who are awarded an annual stipend for their lifelong contributions to the arts and culture of Denmark.

He described his mother's childhood in the biographically based book, "En historie om seks søstre" ("A story of six sisters," Gyldendal, 2009).

His family moved from Nibe to Beder, south of Aarhus, when he was 12.

The move was painful for Jensen; he missed his friends and he longed for the woods and waters of his childhood home.

He made the short list (5 authors, nominated from 34 countries) for the Hans Christian Andersen Award two times, in 2010 and again in 2016.

In 2014, he was nominated for the Nordic Council Children and Young People's Literature Prize for his eighth collection of square stories, published in 2012.

The Nordic Council praised the "humour and seriousness" of Jensen's work, suggesting that his stories have "brought greetings from Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll and E. T. A. Hoffman and other great poets to all the children and adults who just wanted to read along."

Louis Jensen was born in Nibe, Denmark close to the Limfjord in northern Jutland.

Memories of his childhood in Nibe are found in many of his works, including his 2014 collection of short prose pieces, "Elefanterne holdt hver gang med Tarzan" ("The elephants always sided with Tarzan"), which "turns the story of Jensen's childhood into mystic stuff, into literature."

As a young man, Jensen studied to be an architect, with a specialty in urban planning, and he worked as an architect and city planner for a private firm next to the Aarhus townhall.

The stories were collected into volumes of 100 stories each; in 2016, he published his tenth volume of 100 stories, and an eleventh volume with a single, final story.

The Danish author and literary critic Rikke Finderup has called this work "one of the most radical literary projects in all of Danish literature," and the Square Stories have found an audience among adult readers as well as children.

In Jensen's many literary works for children and for adults, the reader encounters an imaginative landscape where anything can happen.

According to critic Anna Karlskov Skyggebjerg, "In most of Louis Jensen's books, the main character has something to do with the supernatural, the magic, or the fantastic."

But like his literary forefathers H.C. Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, Jensen uses his fantastical settings to portray a world of real dangers, moral and physical, and real human experiences of love and loss.

As Skyggebjerg remarks, "In Jensen's books, there is a great deal of cruelty and evil, but also love and friendship between different creatures and humans."

Jensen received multiple awards and prizes.

He was nominated several times for both of the most prestigious international awards in children's literature, the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award and the Hans Christian Andersen Award.