"You will remember Yahya Hassan as an explosion"

It was on Thursday afternoon that the news that Danish-Palestinian poet Yahya Hassan had been found dead in his apartment. Victor Malm, writer for Expressen culture, reviewed Yahya Hassan's latest collection of poems and describes the poet's passing as "undeniably tragic".

- You will remember Yahya Hassan as an explosion, and I thought it would be so much more now with his second book and how good it was, Victor Malm tells the Culture News.

According to Victor Malm, Yahya Hassan's poetry has meant a lot to the literary scene, and is a unique voice.

- He has given us a grand testimony from a young man who comes from the crime and is thrown into the cultural elite. A man who can't quite live his life, who hates himself but at the same time has an incredible amount of self-confidence that can be seen in his poems. A special kind of young male grief that I do not know if anyone else has managed to portray as him.

Journalist Sofia Olsson portrayed Yahya Hassan on behalf of Babel. She shares Victor Malm's experience of a quirky poet who was not entirely comfortable with the attention. Her first meeting with him occurred at a book fair in Copenhagen when he was only 18 years old, and had just broken through.

- He was both shy and good, big and small. I remember that he, like the crowds on the exhibition floor, with his enormous energy and radiance. It was an absurd experience to see him read from his collection of poems for a collection of magnificent gray-haired book fair visitors. Remember that Pia Kjaersgaard's book was displayed massively in a booth, she tells the Culture News.

Mona Masri, screenwriter and cultural journalist on Swedish Radio, describes Yahya Hassan as "a unique voice in the Nordic countries".

- He was a fantastic poet, and the world he wrote about I have never seen in literature. To a certain extent, I could recognize myself: having roots in the Middle East, being raised in a suburb and children to immigrants. There was both love, criticism and hatred. He didn't romanticize that world, which made him brave, says Mona Masri, and continues:

- He leaves behind an incredibly large void. Many future poets may be inspired by him and dare to go further in his poetry, be ruthless and just like him put poetry first.