A battle is raging between two Danish scholars over the status of a prize-winning biography of Søren Kierkegaard that appeared in English translation in February of this year. Princeton University Press has called Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography “the definitive account of Kierkegaard's life”. Publishers Weekly calls it “monumental and magisterial”, and an American Kierkegaard scholar writing in The Wall Street Journal called it “superb”. Another scholar, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, said that while it was hard to imagine what a new biography of Kierkegaard might consist of, this most recent work had solved that problem “masterfully”. Danish reviewers have been similarly extravagant in their praise. A reviewer for the Danish newspaper Politiken asserted that no other biography “would ever even approach it, much less surpass it”.
The biography received the prestigious Georg Brandes Prize and the Danish newspaper Weekendavisen 's literary prize. It is in its fifth Danish edition. Since its publication in Denmark in 2000, it has been translated into German, Swedish, Norwegian, Hungarian, and now English. The George Brandes prize selection committee said they chose the work because of its “academic thoroughness” and because of the “rigour of the standards of verification to which it adhered”...more here
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