All prizes Denmark
Denmark · Since 1949 · For books in Danish
Denmark's booksellers' prize, awarded each February or March after a vote among the country's booksellers and their staff to a book by a living Danish author published the year before. It names a winner only, and an author can win it once.
The prize was founded in 1949 by BoghandlerKlubben, a social club for people in the Danish book trade, and was first called Boghandlernes Gyldne Laurbær. When the club was dissolved in 2010, it carried on only as the prize's administrator. Each January ballots go out to the country's bookshops, and booksellers and their staff vote for a living Danish author and a book of fiction from the year before. The most votes wins, and no author can win twice. The prize often goes to a bestseller. The winner is surprised with the news in February or March and receives a laurel wreath, a gold pin, a diploma and a book voucher; until 2010 there was also a cash sum. The prize is named for the year it is given: the 2026 prize went to a novel of 2025.
Gyldne Laurbær 2026 · Winner
Niels Krause-Kjær · 62 when first published
Novel · 286 pages · Family, Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:A young farmer in post-war Denmark dreams of the wider world and confides his life to three friends from folk high school in a shared notebook; years after his death his son, a member of parliament under pressure, finds it.
Gyldne Laurbær 2025 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Voice of the Butterfly”
Benjamin Koppel · 50 when first published
Novel · 448 pages · Family, Historical, War
AI-generated summary:A singer stuck in his career finds two cassette tapes addressed to him in his mother's attic, recorded decades earlier by a woman who was sent to Theresienstadt in 1943 as a young opera singer.
Gyldne Laurbær 2024 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Best Families”
Kim Blæsbjerg · 49 when first published
Novel · 568 pages · Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:In 1953 a chemical company moves its factory to the small West Jutland town of Lemvig, and a young engineer and his wife start a new life there as the plant lifts the town out of hardship.
Gyldne Laurbær 2023 · Winner
11%
Maren Uthaug · 50 when first published
Novel · 304 pages · Speculative, Satire
AI-generated summary:In a new age with no men left in society, apart from a few males kept for breeding on Lolland, four women's lives become entangled when a boy turns up outside.
Gyldne Laurbær 2022 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“You Probably Had to Be There”
Thomas Korsgaard · 26 when first published
Novel · 272 pages · Coming of age, Autofiction · Tue, book 3
AI-generated summary:Thrown out of his rented room in Copenhagen, a seventeen-year-old from a violent farm home sells newspaper subscriptions by day and sleeps in the paper's back rooms by night, until a girl offers him her mother's sofa.
Gyldne Laurbær 2021 · Winner
Meter i sekundet
Stine Pilgaard · 36 when first published
Novel · 272 pages
AI-generated summary:A young woman follows her partner to a folk high school in West Jutland, where she must learn the locals' sparing way of talking while caring for a newborn and writing the advice column of the local paper.
Gyldne Laurbær 2020 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Shadow Dancer”
Sara Omar · 33 when first published
Novel · 416 pages · Family, Migration, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In Kurdistan in 1994 a girl has stopped speaking and eating, and her grandparents try to bring her back to life; in Denmark in 2007 the same young woman studies, writes in secret and defies a violent father.
Gyldne Laurbær 2019 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The One Who Lives Quietly”
Leonora Christina Skov · 42 when first published
Novel · 384 pages · Autofiction, Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:When her mother dies, a writer sets out to tell the true story of her life: a lonely girl in a red suburban house north of Copenhagen who believes that perfect behaviour might finally make her parents love her.
Gyldne Laurbær 2018 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Another Branch”
Jesper Wung-Sung · 46 when first published
Novel · 553 pages · Historical, Love, Migration
AI-generated summary:In 1902 Copenhagen's Tivoli puts real Chinese people on show, and a young Danish woman falls for one of them, a love that brings scandal on them both.
Gyldne Laurbær 2017 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Beauty of the People”
Merete Pryds Helle · 51 when first published
Novel · 428 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:On the island of Langeland in the 1930s, a girl grows up in a crowded, poor and violent home, until a young electrician's apprentice offers her a way out to Copenhagen.
Gyldne Laurbær 2016 · Winner
Jesper Stein · 50 when first published
Novel · Crime · Axel Steen, book 4
AI-generated summary:A security chief with a past in counterterrorism is found tortured to death in a Copenhagen penthouse, and a detective still scarred from an undercover operation that nearly killed him takes the case.
Gyldne Laurbær 2015 · Winner
Kvinden de meldte savnet
Sara Blædel · 50 when first published
Novel · 320 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:An English housewife is shot dead through her kitchen window, and in Copenhagen a detective's partner disappears after stepping out for cigarettes; the victim turns out to be a Dane who vanished long ago.
Gyldne Laurbær 2014 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Cursed Brood”
Anne-Cathrine Riebnitzsky · 39 when first published
Novel · Family
AI-generated summary:On a flight home from Afghanistan, a woman sits down beside a doctor and resolves to tell him the story of her life, of a childhood in a family of four inseparable siblings, a mother who weeps and a father who hits.
Gyldne Laurbær 2013 · Winner
Profeterne i Evighedsfjorden
Kim Leine · 51 when first published
Novel · 525 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:In 1787 a young Danish priest arrives at the colony of Sukkertoppen in West Greenland to spread the faith, and finds that Greenlanders nearby have rejected colonial rule and gathered around two prophets up Eternal Fjord.
Gyldne Laurbær 2012 · Winner
Dette burde skrives i nutid
Helle Helle · 46 when first published
Novel · 186 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Dorte, twenty and supposedly studying literature in Copenhagen, lives alone by the railway station in Glumsø, rides the train to the city every day and skips her classes.
Gyldne Laurbær 2011 · Winner
Journal 64
Jussi Adler-Olsen · 60 when first published
Novel · 500 pages · Crime · Afdeling Q, book 4
AI-generated summary:Copenhagen detective Carl Mørck reopens the 1980s disappearance of a brothel owner and finds that several other people vanished the same weekend, a trail that leads back to a woman abused in her youth and a surgeon with dark convictions.
Gyldne Laurbær 2010 · Winner
Børnene
Ida Jessen · 45 when first published
Novel · 334 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Newly divorced, the health visitor Solvej moves to a remote house near the village of Hvium so that she can be near her small daughter, who lives there with the girl's father.
Gyldne Laurbær 2009 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Queen Sacrifice”
Hanne-Vibeke Holst · 49 when first published
Novel · 660 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:Elizabeth Meyer, leader of Denmark's Social Democrats, sets out to win the coming general election while hiding that she has an incurable illness, and shrugs off death threats from Islamist extremists.
Gyldne Laurbær 2008 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Red-Letter Days”
Jens Smærup Sørensen · 61 when first published
Novel · 408 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:Three family celebrations in the village of Staun, a confirmation in 1934, a silver wedding in 1967 and a sixtieth birthday in 2003, follow two leading farming families as their old rural world gives way to modern times.
Gyldne Laurbær 2007 · Winner
Den som blinker er bange for døden
Knud Romer · 46 when first published
Novel · 184 pages · Autofiction, Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In 1960s Nykøbing Falster, where hatred of the Germans has outlasted the war, a boy whose mother is German is bullied and shunned at school.
Gyldne Laurbær 2006 · Winner
Hundehoved
Morten Ramsland · 34 when first published
Novel · 383 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Called home to Denmark to his dying grandmother's bedside, Asger hears the half-true stories of three generations of the Eriksson family, starting with a grandfather who escaped a Nazi camp, and sets out after a hidden fortune.
Gyldne Laurbær 2005 · Winner
Undtagelsen
Christian Jungersen · 42 when first published
Novel · 620 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:At a small Copenhagen centre that documents genocide, two of the four women on staff start receiving death threats, and their fear of a Balkan war criminal they have written about slowly turns into suspicion of one another.
Gyldne Laurbær 2004 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Closed Book”
Jette A. Kaarsbøl · 42 when first published
Novel · 534 pages · Historical, Love
AI-generated summary:Copenhagen, 1875: the sheltered twenty-one-year-old Frederikke Leuenbech meets a charming, idealistic obstetrician and enters the circle of the Modern Breakthrough, a life she recounts as a lonely old woman in 1933.
Gyldne Laurbær 2003 · Winner
Nordkraft
Jakob Ejersbo · 34 when first published
Novel · 401 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In Aalborg in the early 1990s, a group of young dealers, users and dreamers try to stay afloat: Maria runs hash for her boyfriend, Allan comes home from sea determined not to slide back, and a friend's death brings them all together.
Gyldne Laurbær 2002 · Winner
Hans Edvard Nørregård-Nielsen · 56 when first published
Nonfiction · 214 pages · Coming of age, Love
AI-generated summary:An art historian recalls his years at grammar school in 1960s Ribe, where a boy from a family of modest means counted for little, until he fell in love with the daughter of the county's highest official.
Gyldne Laurbær 2001 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Room of Love”
Anne Marie Løn · 53 when first published
Novel · 211 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Twenty-five years after a chance day spent with a young French couple on a speedboat on the Seine, the narrator runs into the woman again in a café, and she begins to tell of her long, hidden love for a married man.
Gyldne Laurbær 2000 · Winner
Svend Åge Madsen · 60 when first published
Novel · 375 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:A daughter writes the story of her father, a famous biologist of consciousness, who has gone to pieces since the death of his beloved Helena until a colleague draws him back to research with the promise that he will see her again.