Published in 2.000, ‘Drømmebroer’ (lit. Dream Bridges) is a poetry collection by Danish poet Henrik Nordbrandt that won the 2000 ‘Nordic Council Literature Prize’. Nordbrandt was born in Copenhagen, but he spent a large part of his life abroad in countries such as Turkey, Italy, Greece and Spain (his poetry is strongly influenced by Mediterranean cities, landscape, culture and climate). He has published more than thirty collections of poems, essays, and children’s books, and has also translated Turkish poetry. Henrik Nordbrandt published his first collection of poems ‘Digte’ in 1966, aged 21. ‘Drømmebroer’ is Nordbrandt’s 25th collection of poems: using grim humour, he describes exclusion and living conditions of people in absurd storyettes. His pen is razor-sharp and the poetry is written in a language that is clear and precise. One of the poems depicts a tramcar racing through residential neighbourhoods full of dead people: strangely enough, the tramcar comes from the past, but the residential neighbourhoods belong to modern-day Denmark, the country he fled from when he settled outside Denmark. According to the Adjudicating Committee, in "Drømmebroer" Henrik Nordbrandt has written one of his most beautiful poetry collections. It is a melancholic and ironic, playful and searching suite of poems. The bridge in the collection is a recurring image of life between arrival and departure, as well as a picture of the memory of the lost and rediscovered in poetry.
