Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) was the Danish writer of fairy tales known all over the world: The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling, The Snow Queen, The Emperor's New Clothes, The Little Match Girl and The Steadfast Tin Soldier. Born into poverty, he became one of the most translated authors in history.
Genres
fairy tales and fables
Works
Fairy Tales and Stories
The shoemaker's son
Andersen was born in 1805 in Odense, on the Danish island of Funen, to a poor shoemaker and a washerwoman. His father, who told him stories and built him a toy theatre, died when Hans Christian was eleven.
At fourteen he went alone to Copenhagen, determined to become a singer, dancer or actor. After years of poverty and failure, Jonas Collin, a director of the Royal Theatre, took him under his protection and obtained a royal grant for him to go back to school.
Writer and traveller
Andersen wrote poems, plays, travel books and novels; The Improvisatore, inspired by a stay in Italy, made him known in 1835. The same year he published a small booklet of tales for children, to which he attached little importance at first.
He travelled widely across Europe and to Constantinople, and befriended many writers, including Charles Dickens, whom he visited in 1857. He never married, despite several unhappy loves, notably for the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind.
The tales
Between 1835 and 1872 Andersen published more than 150 tales. A few retell folk stories, but most are his own inventions, giving voice to toys, animals, plants and household objects, and not afraid of sad endings, as in The Little Match Girl.
Beneath their childlike surface, the tales often reflect his own life: the loneliness of the outsider, the longing for recognition, impossible love. A national celebrity, he died in Copenhagen in 1875.
Anecdotes
The Little Mermaid statue
The bronze statue of the Little Mermaid, placed on a rock in Copenhagen harbour in 1913, was a gift to the city from the brewer Carl Jacobsen, who had been moved by a ballet based on the tale. It has been decapitated and vandalised several times.
Five weeks at Dickens's
Andersen's visit to Charles Dickens in 1857, planned for two weeks, lasted five. After he left, Dickens is said to have pinned a card above the mirror in the guest room saying that Hans Andersen had slept there for five weeks, which seemed to the family ages.
Frequently asked questions
What are Andersen's most famous fairy tales?
The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling, The Snow Queen, The Emperor's New Clothes, The Little Match Girl, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, The Princess and the Pea and Thumbelina.
Did Andersen invent his fairy tales?
Mostly. His first tales retold folk stories he had heard as a child, but most of his stories are original.
What is the Hans Christian Andersen Award?
An international prize awarded every two years since 1956 to an author and an illustrator of children's books for their whole body of work, sometimes called the little Nobel.