Henrik Pontoppidan (1857-1943) was one of Denmark's great realist writers, a member of the Modern Breakthrough movement whose works are often compared to those of Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola. The son of a clergyman, he studied engineering in Copenhagen but then left to become a teacher and writer. For his numerous novels and short stories, he won the 1917 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Paul Larkin is a journalist, filmmaker, critic, and translator from the Danish and other Scandinavian languages. In 1997 The Gap in the Mountain... Our Journey into Europe, the six-part film series he wrote and directed as an independent production for RTÉ, won him the European Journalist of the Year Award (the overall award and the film director category). In 2008, he was awarded the Best International Director prize at the New York Independent Film and Video Festival for his Irish-language docudrama Imeacht na nIarlaí (The Flight of the Earls) starring Stephen Rea. He lives in a Gaeltacht area of County Donegal, Ireland, where Irish is the predominant language of everyday use.

Flemming Behrendt is a Danish journalist and literary critic who has written extensively about the work of Henrik Pontoppidan.