Bernhard Bierlich is a Danish anthropologist, with a PhD from the University of Cambridge.
His influences are varied and many. There is his anthropological training, and African and Caribbean field studies, focus on North Africa, deserts, and oases, especially the Sahara Desert. Then there is his research on the Atlantic slave trade at libraries and archives in the UK, Denmark, and France, a major slave trading nation and the home of the protagonist. These influences are basic to his fiction.
Existentialism, surrealism, travel accounts and art have also shaped his writing. But above it all is his anthropological and historical imagination and love of other worlds.
Always driven by playfulness and his anthropological and historical imagination, he questions and reconfigures our relationship with the world as he takes the reader on an odyssey in and out of this world, and explores urgent and timeless issues of identity, evil, and the rebuilding of shattered lives.
Since 2015 he has been affiliated with the St. Croix Foundation for Community Development, www.stcroixfoundation.org
