Karin Michaëlis

Karin Michaëlis (Randers, 1872 – Copenhagen, 1950) was a Danish journalist and author, best known for her novels, short stories and children's books. Over roughly fifty years she wrote more than fifty books in Danish, German and English, and her works have been translated into more than twenty-three languages from the original Danish. She matters because she was one of the most widely read women writers in early twentieth-century Scandinavia, and because her best-known novel openly addressed subjects that were taboo at the time.

Born Katharina Bech-Brøndum into a modest household in Randers, she grew up with a father who worked as a telegraph official and a mother who made wreaths to supplement the family's income. After working as a private tutor, she trained as a piano teacher in Copenhagen, where she met the writer Sophus Michaëlis; they married in 1895 and earned their living largely through theatre criticism. The marriage ended in 1911. The following year she wed the Norwegian-American diplomat Charles Emil Stangeland, from whom she separated in 1917.

Her most famous work, The Dangerous Age (1910), follows a divorced woman who, after another failed romance, resolves to travel the world with a female friend. The book caused a considerable stir for its frank treatment of a forty-year-old woman's sexual desires, and it has been adapted for film several times. Michaëlis was also a committed writer: during the First World War she took part in humanitarian work in Austria, and from the 1930s she warned early about Mussolini and Hitler. At her home in Thurø she sheltered German exiles, among them Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel. Her books were banned in Germany and Italy; after the German invasion of Denmark she emigrated to the United States and returned in 1946.

Her legacy is closely tied to children's literature, above all the Bibi series, seven volumes about an independent, animal-loving girl published between 1929 and 1939 with international success. She is remembered as one of the most translated Danish writers of her era and as an example of an author who combined literature, journalism and social causes.