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“The future will begin all over again.”
In this radiant autobiographical essay, Danish poet Søren Ulrik Thomsen returns to the place—and the year—that shaped his life. At seventeen, he moved with his family to Store Kongensgade 23 in central Copenhagen. In the apartment on the fourth floor, his adult life began. And in the same apartment, his mother’s long struggle with depression took a brutal turn.
What unfolds is a luminous meditation on time, illness, memory, and the intimacy between mother and son. Thomsen writes with startling clarity and wit about the institutions that failed his mother, the objects and addresses that haunt a life, and the strange braid of love and sorrow that runs through even our brightest days.
Blending memoir, cultural history, and a devastating critique of modern psychiatry, Store Kongensgade 23 is both elegy and reckoning. A cult literary figure in Denmark, Thomsen delivers a masterwork of lucid prose and emotional intelligence—an unforgettable portrait of a family, a city, and a young man coming into consciousness amid the ruins of the twentieth century.
Søren Ulrik Thomsen is one of Denmark’s most celebrated poets, revered for his blend of existential clarity, lyric elegance, and urban melancholy.
Since his breakthrough in the 1980s, he has shaped a generation of Scandinavian writers and thinkers.
His essays and poetry are mainstays of Danish literary life, and he is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Danish Academy’s Grand Prize.
Store Kongensgade 23 marks his English-language debut in prose—a landmark work of memory and mourning by a writer of rare moral and stylistic precision.