After being rejected by a large number of manuscripts, his youth novel “The Catamaran” in 1976 caused a stir with its socially realistic description of a betrayed and blunted North Jutland housing project with suicide, sex and drinking.
An environment not unlike the one he himself lived in at the time in Aalborg.
He uncovered the cover of the shadowy sides of the welfare state in “Sabotage”, where young people develop from peaceful protesters to violent city partisans.
In Thy, it led to both books being banished from the library’s children’s departments, and local politicians raging loudly over them in media-covered excitement. They believed that his books corrupted Danish youth.
The ballad did not fall silent when Haller was then granted a four-year scholarship by the Statens Kunstfond to continue his writing.
But Haller kept his nose in the track. And it also took only about 20 years for Thisted City Council to lift its ban.
Bent Haller, who is a press-shy man who prefers to let his now over 100 books for children and adults speak for himself, actually hates that portraits like this always start with the ballad about his first works.
Originally, he is a trained visual artist. But since the hefty kickstart with the first novels, he has published a sea of other novels, poems, theater and film, children’s and adult novels and fantasy.
He has been particularly praised for his youth books such as the cartoon films “The Bird War” and “The Song of the Sperm Whales”, which became the film “Samson and Sally”.
Both books stick to society and rage against a tyrannical supremacy, which is a general theme in Haller’s authorship.
In addition to the Statens Kunstfond’s lifelong grant from 2011, the authorship has also won a number of other prizes, such as the Ordkraft Prize in 2012, the Ministry of Culture’s Children’s Book Prize in 1978 and the Danish Academy’s Silas Prize in 2005.
In addition, every year he is in the top 10 of the largest recipients of library money.
Haller is an incarnated northern Jew and lives with his wife in Aalborg.
Source: The Nordic Page