I want to write a book about Vilhelm’s room and the events which took place in it, or arose from it; those that led to Lise’s death, which I have survived only so that I might write down the story of her and Vilhelm...

The ripples from a breakup radiate outwards from the room where a married couple once loved each other, and a bizarre Lonely Hearts advert sets off a train of tragicomic events that lead to an inevitable conclusion. Tove Ditlevsen’s final novel – published a year before her suicide in 1976 – is a masterful conclusion to a great work of writing: a blackly funny and devastating tour-de-force that pulses with life even as it journeys towards death.

Ditlevsen makes this darkest of all material fascinating, perversely likable and occasionally revelatory. She’s a brilliant writer and formidable thinker * Guardian *
Reading Vilhelm’s Room, the final novel from the great Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen, what hits you first is how wonderful her sentences are […] Ditlevsen’s unusual way of seeing the world, and her sprightly humour, run throughout this short book, […] which now appears in English for the first time in a spirited translation by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell […] A beguiling, often confounding novel from one of the 20th century’s most original writers * Observer *

Tove Ditlevsen (Author)
Tove Ditlevsen was born in 1917 in a working-class neighbourhood in Copenhagen. Her first volume of poetry was published when she was in her early twenties, and was followed by many more books, including the novels The Faces and Vilhelm's Room and her autobiographical masterpiece, Childhood (1967), Youth (1967) and Dependency (1971). She married four times and died by suicide in 1976.

Sophia Hersi Smith (Translator)
Sophia Hersi Smith is a translator living in Copenhagen. Together with Jennifer Russell, she has translated fiction and poetry by Danish writers such as Olga Ravn, Tove Ditlevsen and Solvej Balle.

Jennifer Russell (Translator)
Jennifer Russell is a translator living in Copenhagen. Together with Sophia Hersi Smith, she has translated fiction and poetry by Danish writers such as Olga Ravn, Tove Ditlevsen and Solvej Balle.