Stephen King

Stephen King hædres med særlig H.C. Andersen-pris

Stephen King modtager en særlig H.C. Andersen-pris for sin fantasifulde og mørke fortællekunst, der har tryllebundet millioner af læsere verden over. Prisen markeres med et offentligt arrangement i Odense den 17. november.

En pris til fortællingens mester

Den amerikanske bestsellerforfatter Stephen King modtager i september 2025 The Hans Christian Andersen Special Literature Award, uddelt af The Hans Christian Andersen Literature Committee.

Prisen gives til Stephen King for "hans enestående evne til – i lighed med H.C. Andersen – at bruge den fantasifulde fortællekunst til at udforske menneskelivets mørke og uhyggelige sider, samtidig med at han tryllebinder millioner af læsere verden over.

Stephen Edward King (f. 1947) er en af verdens mest læste og indflydelsesrige forfattere. Han er især kendt for sine gyserromaner, men hans omfattende og varierede forfatterskab rummer langt mere end det. Med over 60 romaner og 200 noveller har han skabt et litterært univers, der spænder fra det psykologisk urovækkende til det dybt menneskelige. Mange af hans værker er filmatiseret, og han har modtaget adskillige internationale priser for sit bidrag til litteraturen.

Offentligt arrangement i Odense

Prisoverrækkelsen markeres ved et arrangement den 17. november i Café Biografen i Odense kl. 13-16.30, hvor den biografaktuelle film The Life of Chuck, baseret på Kings novelle af samme navn, vises.

Arrangementet byder også på et oplæg om Stephen Kings nyere værker ved lektor Thomas Ærvold Bjerre samt en paneldebat om “den mørke H.C. Andersen” med lektor Torsten Bøgh Thomsen, lektor Emily Hogg og professor Anne-Marie Mai – alle fra Syddansk Universitet. Der serveres en forfriskning.

Arrangementet er gratis og åbent for alle, dog med et begrænset antal pladser. Arrangementet foregår i Café Biografen, Amfipladsen 13, 5000 Odense C.

Billetter kan reserveres her.

En særlig pris og en særlig tradition
Det er første gang, at komitéen uddeler en specialpris. Prisen vil blive overrakt privat til Stephen King af komitéens formand. Stephen King deltager ikke i arrangementet i Odense.

Hovedprisen, The Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award, blev uddelt første gang i 2007 og gives hvert andet år - næste gang i 2026. Blandt modtagerne er J.K. Rowling, Isabel Allende, Sir Salman Rushdie, Haruki Murakami og Margaret Atwood.

Kontakt
Anne Høgedal, pressekontakt, Det Humanistiske Fakultet, SDU, tlf.: 65 50 46 66.

Pressefoto: @ Shane Leonard

Stephen King fejring

PROGRAM
17. november 2025 kl. 13-16.30
Café Biografen, Odense

13.00 - 13.05
Velkomst
v. Jens Ringsmose, rektor for SDU

13.05 - 13.10 
Motivation af tildelingen af The Hans Christian Andersen Special Literature Award til Stephen King
v. Jens Olesen, fmd. for The Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award Committee. Talen fremføres af Michael Møller Nielsen, medlem af The Award Committee.

13.10 - 13.30
Oplæg: Stephen Kings sene forfatterskab – fra horror- til hybridforfatter
v. Thomas Ærvold Bjerre, lektor ved Amerikanske Studier, SDU
Med udgangspunkt i romanerne Mercedes-manden (2014, da. 2016), Outsideren (2018) og Billy Summers (2021, da. 2022) giver Thomas Ærvold Bjerre et indblik i Stephen Kings senere forfatterskab. Oplægget fokuserer på Kings kombination af horror, krimi og noir samt det fortsatte fokus på USA’s sociale og politiske spændinger.

13.30 - 14.00
Paneldebat: Den mørke H.C. Andersen
v. Torsten Bøgh Thomsen, lektor, Emily Hogg, lektor, og Anne-Marie Mai, professor (ordstyrer), Litteraturstudier, SDU.
De tre litteraturforskere dykker ned i de dystre og uhyggelige sider af H.C. Andersens forfatterskab. Sammen undersøger de, hvordan hans mørke fortællinger har påvirket moderne litteratur, og hvorfor de stadig taler til os i dag.

14.00 - 14.30
Reception, kaffe og kage

14.30 - 16.30
Filmvisning: The Life of Chuck
Amerikansk fantasy-drama-film fra 2024, skrevet og instrueret af Mike Flanagan. Baseret på en novelle af samme navn fra 2020 af Stephen King, som indgår i novellesamlingen If It Bleeds. Plottet følger de formative øjeblikke i livet for Charles "Chuck" Krantz, fortalt i omvendt kronologisk rækkefølge – fra hans død, som falder sammen med universets ende, til hans barndom.

Arrangementet er gratis og åbent for alle, dog med et begrænset antal pladser. Billetter kan reserveres her: https://lnk.dk/5fdb

Arrangeret af Syddansk Universitet i samarbejde med The Hans Christian Andersen Literature Commitee.

Speech by Thomas Ærvold Bjerre

Associate Professor at University of Southern Denmark

Stephen King’s Late Career – From Horror to Hybrid Authorship

Good afternoon.

This year, Stephen King is being honored with the Hans Christian Andersen Special Literature Award—presented in recognition of his “unique ability – similar to Hans Christian Andersen – to use imaginative storytelling to explore the dark and sinister sides of human life, while captivating millions of readers worldwide.”

As a scholar of American literature and a lifelong Stephen King reader, it is a pleasure to take part in today’s celebration.

In my talk, I will focus on Stephen King’s late career—not the King who wrote Carrie, The Shining, or It, and who frightened generations away from basements, clowns, and large luxuty hotels. Instead, I want to turn to the Stephen King, who over the past ten to fifteen years has moved somewhat away from horror and can increasingly be seen as a kind of hybrid author: one who blends crime fiction, noir, thriller, and social realism with the uncanny and the deeply human.

To keep things manageable, I will focus on three novels: Mr. Mercedes (2014), The Outsider (2018), and Billy Summers (2021). Together, they show how King continues to build on existing themes and concerns but also his evolution and his use of different genres to understand—and comment on—contemporary America.

But first, a few general reflections on King’s authorship—its themes and central concerns.
Above all, it is important to stress that Stephen King never writes only about monsters—he has always written about America. From the beginning, King has drawn on a wide range of literary genres and traditions, but he has also reshaped them by placing classic archetypes, conflicts, and narrative forms in the middle of a modern, recognizable reality. In this sense, King’s stories have always mirrored the deepest anxieties and fears of American society; even the supernatural reflects the social conflicts that have shaped the U.S during King’s lifetime: addiction, the breakdown of families, technological dread, small-town xenophobia, religious extremism, and failing institutions (Magistrale)

This is precisely the thread the late King continues, even though the monsters change shape. The genres shift, but the diagnosis of America remains.

Across his career, one can clearly see this continuity: In the early King of the 1970s and 80s, the focus was often on the small town as microcosm, on cosmic, supernatural evil. The horror served as a mirror of American anxiety.

In the 1990s and into the 2000s, King begins to experiment more. The Green Mile (1996) was initially published in six monthly volumes, deliberately reviving the 19th-century tradition of serialized fiction popularized by Dickens. A similar ambition shapes 11/22/63 (2011), a large-scale counterfactual historical novel that tackles the central traumatic event of twentieth-century America: the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Although the novel deploys elements of suspense, its expansive narrative arc makes time, moral choice, and human consequence far more important than shock or terror.

Many of King’s works in the 2010s and up till now have been marked by a continuation of old themes—loneliness, broken families, technological fear, weak institutions—but now often in more realistic forms. King consciously blends genres: the momentum of crime fiction, the psychological depth of thrillers, and the existential weight of horror. At the same time, he his constant gaze to contemporary America means that new topics are added to existing ones: digitalization, misinformation, class divides, and a political polarization that reaches into everyday life.

And now, to the late King—summarized in three recent novels.

Mr. Mercedes (2014): Crime Fiction with Social Horror

The novel opens with a brutal and deeply social-realist image: a large Mercedes (a symbol of wealth and luxury) plows into a line of unemployed people waiting outside a job fair in recession-era America. The evil behind the wheel is not supernatural but socially produced: Brady Hartsfield, the villain, is an angry, lonely young man shaped by abuse, a dysfunctional family, and a sick society.

The themes in Mr. Mercedes are thoroughly contemporary: digital alienation, loneliness, class disparities, and online radicalization. This time, instead of a solitary protagonist in the classic King mode, we get a small collective of misfits: the retired detective Bill Hodges, the young Black college student Jerome Robinson, and Holly Gibney, an older woman with OCD who is on the autism spectrum—and who turns out to have a classic detective’s intuition. Each character is marginal or socially peripheral, yet together they form a community that bridges generations, races, and temperaments; a microcosm of a possible, more inclusive America.

Here King replaces supernatural demons with social monsters. Crime fiction drives the plot, but he never loses sight of how violence emerges from American society itself.

Mr. Mercedes also marks the beginning of a significant detective phase in King’s later career. Bill Hodges receives his own trilogy—with Holly Gibney in a supporting role. King has since become increasingly attached to Holly: after the trilogy, she returned in The Outsider, appeared as the lead in the novella “If It Bleeds,” became the title character of the 2023 novel Holly, and once again takes center stage in King’s latest novel Never Flinch.

The Outsider (2018): Horror Returns—Inside a Crime Framework

Horror returns in The Outsider, but it is embedded within a realistic crime structure. The novel begins as a classic forensic crime story: a schoolteacher, Terry Maitland, is accused of a horrific child murder. All evidence points to his guilt. At the same time, he has a watertight alibi. He is guilty—and innocent.

King uses this paradox to ask what happens when the evidence itself becomes a mirror? When reality splits? And when realism can no longer contain the mystery of the plot, horror enters the stage in the form of a supernatural outsider capable of taking on the form of others.

Theoretically, this evokes Freud’s concept of das Unheimliche—the uncanny—not monsters or dark basements, but the familiar becoming suddenly strange. Reality seems to shift slightly, making what we trusted no longer trustworthy.

In The Outsider, evidence, faces, and identities begin to mirror one another in ways that undermine the rational order.

The point is not the supernatural creature—it is the doubt. Once again, the supernatural mirrors contemporary anxieties—not about demons, but about misinformation, fake news, mistrust, identity crises, and a society that has lost the ability to distinguish truth from falsehood.

The Outsider is marked by clear political undercurrents: one senses both the paranoia of the MAGA era and the Black Lives Matter movement’s demands for truth and justice. As such, the novel is a good example of King’s hybrid form: crime logic, horror shock, and media-age diagnosis in one.

Billy Summers (2021): Noir, Trauma, and the Healing Power of Storytelling

Billy Summers is neither horror nor crime in any strict sense, but it is saturated with the psychological and social themes that have always been central to King’s storytelling. It sits somewhere between noir, psychological thriller, and war novel.

Billy Summers is an Iraq War veteran and sniper who now works as a hitman with a strict moral code: he only kills “bad men.” When he accepts one last job—a choice any noir reader knows never ends well—the plot is set in motion.

The novel’s most important layer concerns how violence lingers—in the body, in the psyche—and how storytelling and writing become a way of processing it.

As Billy prepares for his final job, he begins to write his own life story. The novel thus becomes a story about storytelling—about how writing becomes a means of working through one’s own history of violence.

King has long been preoccupied with writing itself—think of The Shining, Misery, or The Dark Half—but where those earlier novels associated writing with addiction, obsession, and dark forces, in Billy Summers, writing takes on a new function; it becomes a path towards understanding and survival, a site for processing guilt and trauma. The themes echo those of contemporary American war literature—from Tim O’Brien to Kevin Powers—making King, in this instance, a realist among realists.

Billy Summers is the culmination of the realistic King, combining noir ethics, war trauma, and the healing force of narrative.

Three Novels, One Development

Taken together, the three novels reveal several clear developments.

First, King’s genre blending is not merely decoration, it is method. King uses crime fiction to create momentum and explore ethics and facts in a post-truth era. He uses the noir and thriller modes to analyze psychology, trauma, and guilt. And he brings in horror to raise existential questions about the consequences of reality itself shifting.

Secondly, the form of evil has changed. Where the early King portrayed cosmic evil as something often external, almost divine, the later King explores everyday, systemic evil, that born of loneliness, media noise, and class divides. The supernatural still appears occasionally—as in The Outsider—to remind us that the boundary between the real and the uncanny remains porous.

Thirdly, the late novels mirror the United States here and now. They revolve around recession, digitalization, fake news, guns, violence, and a nation trapped in its own paranoia.

Today, Stephen King has long since moved beyond the horror that has defined him for much of his career. He is a cultural force with over sixty novels behind him (and I haven’t even mentioned the hundreds of adaptations), a writer that uses genres strategically to comment on the present. Together, his genres give him a platform from which he can deliver social critique without sacrificing the narrative thrust that has always made him popular.

An attempt at summing up Stephen King’s late career in a single sentence could be to say that he has moved from writing about fear to writing from within it. Reality itself is often the most frightening thing. And for that reason, Stephen King has never been more relevant than he is today.