An Artist’s Home

Amalie Laulund Trudsø

Original title: Kunstnerhjem
Publisher: Gutkind, Denmark, 2025
Genre: Novel
Pages: 269 pages

An Artist’s Home takes place over four decades from the 1940s to the 1970s and depicts the period in a woman’s life from late childhood until her own children have left home.

Signe grows up in comfortable circumstances, her father a well-to-do veterinary surgeon, but driven by her urge to draw and paint she marries Johan with dreams of living a different life in which art is at the forefront. But realities prevail and after some years Johan leaves her on her own with three children for whom she must struggle to provide.

It is a journey through social class, but also through the life of a woman and mother, where freedom and independence, and the right to one’s own body, come at a price.

“An Artist’s Home is a delicately turned, yet substantial story about art, class and a woman’s life through four decades. Amalie Laulund Trudsø returns superbly, nine years after her previous novel (…) The novel speaks with quiet, assured authority, allowing both vulnerability and strength to shine through in sentences that are easy to read, yet land with weight (…) elegantly and seamlessly told (…) Laulund Trudsø writes in a way that stirs something deep in me as a parent.”

Politiken

“Trudsø writes without pathos, but with such enormous clarity and human warmth that it hits hard (…) The language is precise, restrained, and at the same time allows space for the poetic and evocative. Trudsø possesses a fine ability to describe rooms, glances and silences with almost cinematic intensity.”

Bogtanken.dk

“Amalie Laulund Trudsø has written the novel I’ve been looking for (…) She creates a space where I can sink down completely into the story and become totally engaged with her characters. A powerful depiction of a woman’s life.”

Litteraturelsker

“An Artist’s Home is a real literary pearl, written with stylistic and poetic flair (…) So well-executed, because its form and structure lend the writing a stringency and verve that makes it a joy to read.”

Annelovebooks

Amalie Laulund Trudsø

Amalie Laulund Trudsø (b. 1988) made her debut in 2013 with Coordinates – a collection of prose texts classified as “Copenhagen texts,” in which familiar streets in Copenhagen are linked to poetic depictions of the ups and downs of youth.

In 2016, she followed up her success with the novel Summerhouse, which portrays a summer house by Sejerø Bay and a girl on the brink of adolescence.

An Artist’s Home (2025) is a novel about women’s lives and motherhood, spanning four decades from the 1940s to the 1970s, where liberation and the right to one’s own body prove to come at a high cost.