Tom Buk-Swienty, a critical acclaimed bestselling Danish author, is widely recognized as Denmark’s most engaging narrative historian. “He makes history come alive on the page” and “his writing is evocative.”

He is the winner of numerous awards, among others the prestigious Danish Søren Gyldendal Award, the Reader’s book Award, the History Book of the Year Award, the Danish Writers’ Award and the Rungstedlund Award.

His most recent book, Safari from Hell (2022), telling the amazing story of 30 Danes who were sent on a secret mission to German East Africa during World War I. Prior to that he published the authorized autobiography of the Danish Queen, Margrethe II, The Making of a Queen (2019) chronicling her early years. The memoir, based on almost 40 hours of interviews with Her Majesty, was met with glowing reviews and was the number one bestseller of the year.

In The Lioness – Karen Blixen in Africa, published 2019, he presents the untold story of Karen Blixen in Africa based on the latest Blixen research. The Lioness is the culmination of a decade of work on the Dinesen family. Tom Buk-Swienty has written a two-volume biography on Karen Blixen’s father Wilhem Dinesen, Captain Dinesen—Fire and Blood (2013) and Captain Dinesen—Until Death do Us Part (2014), and one volume on Karen Blixen and her brother Thomas Dinesen 1918: A Story of Love and War (2016).

His previous two-volume work on the Danish-German war of 1864, Slagtebænk Dybbøl (2008) and Dommedag Als (2010), became national bestsellers and have been adapted as a TV drama series for National Danish TV (DR). To date, the most ambitious and expensive project for DR, noted internationally for the political drama ‘Borgen’, and the crimes series ‘The Killing’ and ‘Those Who Kill.’

The 1864 drama series was broadcast in England, Germany, and France.

An abridged one-volume English edition of Buk-Swienty’s war epic, “which crackles with narrative energy” according to a review in Financial Times, was published in the UK.

Previous works include a biography on the legendary muckracker Jacob Riis, The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America, translated into the English and published by Norton in 2008. “It is meticulously researched and gracefully written, it is both and education and a delight.”

Before becoming a full-time writer in 2012, Tom Buk-Swienty held a position as associate professor at the School of Journalism, University of Southern Denmark. Prior to this, he worked as US correspondent for Weekendavisen, the Danish equivalent of the NewYorker. He was a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Center for Writers and Scholars in 2003-4.

He has a MA in History from University of Copenhagen and University of California, Santa Barbara and is an honorary professor in history at the University of Southern Denmark. He lives in Copenhagen.

List of his books.

Published by Profile Books, London, 2015

The Battle of Dybbøl,1864. Prussian troops lay siege to an outpost in Schleswig, in the far south of Denmark. Danish troops make a valiant attempt to hold out but are overrun by the might of the Prussian onslaught. A seemingly minor footnote in Prussia and Bismarck’s rise to continental supremacy, the conflict foreshadowed the forces that, fifty years later, would tear Europe apart.

Reconstructed from original eyewitness accounts, Tom Buk-Swienty’s 1864 is a magisterial re-telling of a pivotal, overlooked chapter in European history. But most of all, in its human detail, from touching letters between husbands and wives to heartbreaking individual stories of loss, 1864 is a gripping human drama that shows the effect war has on soldiers, on families and on the individual men and women who must live its realities.

‘We are right in the thick of it, shells flying overhead and every day another man is wounded … I’m on outpost duty tonight and only God knows if I’ll get through it unharmed.I have as much of a chance as the next man.’ Private Niels Larsen, April 1864