2018 Klaus Müller-Wille

For many years, Klaus Müller-Wille has been a tireless advocate of Hans Christian Andersen on the international academic scene. In his scholarly work, he has particularly emphasized Andersen’s modernity. His latest book has to be regarded as his crowning achievement not just because it demonstrates in great detail how Hans Christian Andersen anticipated the literary avant-gardes of much later periods, but because it reconstructs his work in a way we have never seen before.

While it is well-known that Andersen was obsessed with paper cuts and clippings, his interest in the materiality of literature – ranging all the way from writing instruments to the smell or design of books – has never before been analysed so profoundly and in connection with the writing itself. Over the course of the last decade, Klaus Müller-Wille has written one of the most intriguing and exciting studies on the author to date. Based on a vast range of sources and archival material from the Hans Christian Andersen Hus, it will undoubtedly stand as a work of reference for many years to come.