Orientation

A short orientation in my site:

HHistory: I have written a series of history books for school children, called “Children in Denmark´s History”. Number eleven was published in 2016. The books are published by Alinea, Copenhagen. Every book tells the story of real danish children. They tell the reader about their dailyday life in a special key year, fx 971, 1397, 1534, 1592, 1658, 1872, 1914, 1944, 1971. Through the eyes of the children we discover danish history.

I was teaching history in elementray school for many years until I started studying history at the University of Southern Denmark. I have been a board member at the Funen Historical Society for 21 years and I write articles on several subjects, specializing in Children´s history.

To be published in 2024: Angrebet på orlogsskibet The Kite i Storebælt 1808. Danish privateers´ attack on the british war-ship The Kite in the Great Belt during the Napoleonic War.

Currently I am working on an article about the very early danish industrialisation, around 1750, and the impact of foreign know-how on the development of trade, crafts and industry in Denmark.

In 2021 I published an article about a self-employed photographer, Andrea Gomard, who had her own atelier in Odense around 1900.

Story-telling: I am an active story-teller and also an active story-collector. I tell stories in many different places, like schools, libraries, churches and cultural centers. I have a big repertoire, from viking stories and myths to stories from the Middle Eastern countries.

Schools: For several years I have been thinking of how to bring more storytelling and more use of oral work into everyday teaching at danish schools. Together with teh danish storytellers organisation, FIDA, I am working on this. We have started with the schools of one ciry, Svendborg, and our first results are convincing: Children listen and concentrate when their teacher or another schoolchild tells a story. It may be in a history lesson as well as in a math og physics lesson.

2 Hours per Week: I am chairman and founder of the organisation 2 Hours per Week. Bilingual children between 3 and 8 years of age are matched with a grown-up danish volunteer. The two of them meet once a week for two hours where they play and read books together. In this way the child learns to express itself in the danish language and it gets to know danish culture and traditions – in a playful way. 2 Hours per Week started in Odense and has now branches in Esbjerg and Aarhus as well.

The Story-Bazaar: About 15 years ago I started getting interested in stories from our immigrant countries. I started collecting them, spending time with immigrants in Denmark, studying the litterature and travelling in the Middle East, spending time in countries like Palestine and Syria.

I have published the stories in four books in a series called The Story-Bazaar: Stories and History from Turkey, Stories and History from Bosnia & Hercegovina, Stories and History from five arabian countries: Irak, Jordan, Libanon, Palestine and Syria – and Stories and History from Iran. Between the stories and myths you can read historical facts about the time, the place and the background for the stories. The books are published by the publishing company Ravnerockforlaget.

Paintings: I love painting. My paintings and my research for the books I publish are often mixed. So for a while I painted angels because of the title of a book in The Story-Bazaar: “An Angel on both Shoulders”. The paintings were exibited at the artgallery Solvognen in Odense.