5 must-read writers from Denmark to add to your bookshelf

Danish is known to be a simple but rhythmic language, with many words that carry multiple meanings at once. This can mean it is electrifying in the right hands, and a host of Hollywood adaptations and the explosive popularity of Nordic Noir are testament to Denmark's status as a storytelling powerhouse. The properties have also resulted in some spellbinding poetry emerging from the country. Our reading list for Denmark therefore includes both poets and novelists who stretch and bend the limits of language as they wish - with extraordinary results.

Only recently has Danish author Tove Ditlevsen gained international attention through her autobiographical Copenhagen trilogy. Published between 1967 and 1971 – just a few years before she committed suicide through an overdose of sleeping pills – Childhood, Youth and Dependency follow her life in the rough working-class environment of Vesterbro, once renowned as Copenhagen's red light district. With the pulse of the central street of Istedgade in her blood, as she puts it, Ditlevsen writes vigorously and unsentimentally about her life-long desire to become an author while drawing a captivating picture of a city that was long ago.

Olga Ravn’s poems and novels stem from an unparalleled capacity for creating images through words. Thus far, her rousing poetry – like her acclaimed debut collection Jeg æder mig selv som lyng (I Eat Myself Like Heather) from 2012 that examines how the female body echoes to sex, love and friendship – is only available in Danish, Swedish and German. Fortunately, her novels Celestine and The Employees come in English and are just as infectious as her poems.

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His signature feature were capital letters, as if he had punched the words one after another into the paper. Yahya Hassan had a short, intense life. Yet, his debut book, published at the age of 18, is the best-selling debut poem collection in the history of Danish literature. Dealing with his upbringing in a violent household as a son of Palestinian refugees, determined by failure, crime and religious hypocrisy, his poems pierce right into the heart and have been translated into numerous languages.

Anyone who's seen Out of Africa will doubtless remember the scene where Robert Redford washes Meryl Streep’s hair in a basin. The classic cinematic moment and the big Hollywood adaptation mean that the book of the same name remains Karen Blixen's most famous. Yet her original memoir is about much more than just an epic romance, beautifully capturing her years with the native Kikuyu people and the wild animals of Kenya under colonialism. Other titles in her bibliography, such as Seven Gothic Tales and Babette’s Feast, may be less prominent, but are equally brilliant must-reads.

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The blending of meanings, genres and personalities is a recurring theme in Peter Høeg’s writing. Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow from 1992 brought him international success and is often regarded as the starting point of what became known in the Anglosphere as Nordic Noir. Following the events of a boy who is found dead in the harbour of Copenhagen, the thriller takes us to the icescapes of Greenland as it unravels a suitably dark tale. The Susan Effect, published in 2012, is no less consuming and will hit you with some jaw-dropping moments.