Christian Jungersen

Christian Jungersen is the author of two award-winning novels, Thickets and the international bestseller The Exception.

Jungersen was born and raised in the northern suburbs of Copenhagen, Denmark. His father was a lawyer and his mother taught Latin and Greek in high school.

After finishing his Masters degree in Communication and Sociology, Jungersen wrote six screenplays, none of which have been produced. He also held a number of part-time jobs including: copywriter for an ad agency, TV script consultant, and film teacher at Copenhagen Community College.

He made his literary debut in 1999 with the novel Thickets, (Danish title Krat, not yet published in English) which was critically acclaimed, won the Best First Novel award in Denmark, and became a Danish bestseller.

But before Jungersen’s debut novel found a publisher, he continued to work in an office: first for an ad agency and then as an Information Officer, where he witnessed varying forms of office harassment that he later drew upon when writing his second novel The Exception.

Thickets won Jungersen a three-year writing fellowship from the Danish Arts Foundation – the first time in twenty years that such a grant was awarded to someone who had written only one novel. The grant allowed him to devote himself full-time to working on The Exception over the next four years.

The Exception takes place in a small fictitious organization, The Danish Centre for Genocide Information. In order for Jungersen to write the novel he conducted extensive research on the psychology of genocide perpetrators at the actual Danish Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (now a part of The Danish Institute for International Studies). He also became a member of The International Association of Genocide Scholars and participated in a number of conferences in the U.S. and in Europe.

The Exception entered the Danish Top Ten list upon its publication in October 2004 and stayed on this list for more than 18 months – two consecutive Christmas seasons in its original edition. The novel has sold more than 130,000 copies in a country of 5 million people and has been sold for publication in 15 countries. It has won two Danish major literary prizes and has been shortlisted for major prizes in United Kingdom, France and Sweden.

Christian Jungersen now lives in New York City where he is working on his third novel. The only fact he’s disclosed about it is that ‘it won’t be about a workplace’.

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