Jens Smærup Sørensen: Portrait of a Mother

'Mor' (2025) is a tightly composed novel about a woman's life in the 20th century and the relationship between mother and son. The book is a portrait of Jens Smærup Sørensen's mother, born around 1900 and raised in a fishing family in Bjerget - a small town between Bulbjerg and Limfjorden. She marries into a farming family in Staun on the other side of Limfjorden, and this is where Jens Smærup Sørensen grows up.

Smærup Sørensen's complicated relationship with his father has left many traces in his authorship. In 'Hjertet slår og slår' (2012), the father appeared as the dying patriarch who set memory's engine in motion - but the mother was absent. That question became the starting point for the new novel, which portrays a loving woman whose life in many ways was limited by the opportunities that marriage and society offered a woman from the countryside at that time.

Jens Smærup Sørensen (b. 1946) has a broad body of work spanning poetry and short stories to novels and plays. His breakthrough came with 'Mærkedage' (2007), which earned him several prizes, including De Gyldne Laurbær and the DR Novel Prize.

Arranged in collaboration with Humlebæk Church.