Suzanne Brøgger

Suzanne Bragger was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, during the German Occupation in World War II. Her maternal grandparents and other Jewish relatives had to flee to Sweden in 1943, but her mother Lilian Henius remained behind to run the family business making Aalborg Aquavit. After the war, Suzanne lived in Sri Lanka and Thailand when her stepfather's work took the family abroad. She worked briefly as a model and had a stint as an actress with the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen in 1968. While a student at the University of Copenhagen, she also worked as a journalist, travelling to Vietnam, Uzbekistan, Israel, and Lebanon. She made her literary debut with a collection of essays, Deliver Us from Love, in 1973, but became famous in 1978 with the publication of Crème Fraiche, the first in a trilogy of autobiographic novels. She went on to write several more novels, including the family saga Jadekatten (The Jade Cat, 1997). In 1991, she married Keld Zeruneith, an author and professor of literature, with whom she had already had a daughter. In 1997, she was elected one of the few female members of the Danish Academy.