Niels Krause-Kjær: The Lost Land

Niels Krause-Kjær won the Golden Laurels 2025 for his novel 'Ude for uden' - a personal account of his native Jutland and the cultural transformation that dismantled rural farming culture and sidelined the provinces in favour of the cities over two generations.

The novel's protagonist Erik is a young man who dreams of conquering the world. He and his generation were too young for the resistance movement, but as farmers they must now save Denmark in the post-war modern era. Erik marries Lisbet and buys a small farm with good land - and the two become firsthand witnesses to the slow disappearance of the only way of life they know. From being heroes, they end as villains.

The novel is fiction, but is based on a travel journal written by Niels Krause-Kjær's father and his folk-school friends over half a century - a book Niels discovered in the Danish National Archives. In the lecture, he discusses the novel's creation and shares his reflections on inheritance, identity, and the shifts that have shaped the Denmark we know today.