Leif Hasle

Leif Hasle was born in Aarhus in 1933, the son of Henning Hasle, a conservative Member of Parliament. Due to the German occupation, the family moved to Copenhagen in 1940, where Hasle spent most of his life. After completing high school at Østre Borgerdyd’s gymnasium, he studied at both the University of Copenhagen and the University of Vienna. For several years, he taught at two Copenhagen high schools, where he was a beloved and respected teacher.

Hasle had a deep and lifelong passion for literature. After debuting as a poet in Hvedekorn in 1954 with the poem “Collision,” he published his first novel Rejsen mod strømmen (Voyage Against the Tide) in 2000. This marked the beginning of a series of impressionistically colored novels and short stories, often drawing on autobiographical material, published by the Multivers publishing house. His final novel, Opstandelse (Resurrection) in 2013, was a nuanced reimagining of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, set in 1980s Copenhagen.

Hasle’s love for literature was also demonstrated by his role as a co-founder of the Proust Society in Denmark. In 2016, he was appointed an honorary member. Over the years, he edited several of the society’s bulletins and played an active role in the editing of the major Danish translation of Proust’s work, working closely with the primary translator, Else Henneberg Pedersen.

In addition to literature, Hasle had a strong interest in history and cultural history. In the 1960s, he became involved in a passionate fight against the brutal urban renewal projects in Copenhagen, which he critiqued in the satirical novel Lad os bygge en by (Let’s Build a City, 2002). Thanks to his efforts, several beautiful streets in Copenhagen’s city center were preserved. Hasle also owned a townhouse in Landemærket for half a century, which he meticulously restored and furnished with a unique collection that documented the art, crafts, and literature of the Danish Golden Age.

Leif Hasle was a conservative in the classical sense of the word—cultured, thoughtful, and socially engaged. Yet beneath his fascination with people, culture, and art lay a profound interest in nature. He was deeply captivated by nature’s long, non-human timescales in geology, and equally concerned with the more immediate cycles of growth and decay in plants and human life. The intricate relationship between natural time and human time was perhaps Hasle’s greatest interest, a theme to which he often returned in conversation, teaching, his collections, and much of his writing.

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