Henrik Pontoppidan

Born 24 July 1857, Pontoppidan grew up in a conservative milieu he would spend his writing life rejecting. He became the youngest member of the Modern Break-Through, the movement that dragged Danish letters into modernity, and in many ways the most original voice in it. His novels and short stories set out to chronicle present-day Denmark with an eye toward social progress, but over time the hope curdled - his later work carries the weight of someone who stopped believing change would come. He shared the 1917 Nobel Prize for Literature with Karl Gjellerup for "his authentic descriptions of present-day life in Denmark," a recognition of the unusually complete picture he'd built of his country and his era. He died 21 August 1943, having kept his distance from every ideological home offered to him.