About Backyard Barons
About the publisher
The established industry can suck it
We are insignificant. The universe is cold, and we are merely embers left over from the great bang.
We have no ambitions toward immortality. That sort of thing has never been within our reach. This is literature at eye level, without the nonsense. The established industry can suck it. The publisher has received multiple awards for design and work, including the Karen Blixen Prize for our innovative and groundbreaking approach to literature.
Baggaardsbaroner is, at its core, a desire to make literature more spontaneous – more present.
About Onkel Hawaii
Author, illustrator, and, in reality, 13 ducks disguised under a trench coat.
O.G. founder Uncle Hawaii's authorship is characterized by its jazzy existentialism with a penchant for the morbid, surreal, and grotesque.
Uncle Hawaii debuted with the cult novel *Andedrengens Bodegakronik* (2014) and has since published a range of novels, short story collections, and graphic novels. He believes in the downfall as the quintessence of literature. Defeat is the substance from which stories are made. Defeat fascinates—a bottomless abyss that can be endlessly filled. Victories, on the other hand, are self-evident, factual, dull. Ironically, this philosophy has earned him literary acclaim, including the Karen Blixen Prize, the Ping Prize, the Asger Schnack Prize, and the Delbanco Prize.
For a brief period, Uncle Hawaii was part of the avant-garde English death cult Doom Patrol
In his youth, he tied for 3rd place in a Mr. Wet T-shirt contest at Crazy Daisy in Næstved.
Why the silly names?
The names are due to so much—a path of chance without any grand hidden plan.
In the late, deserted streets—back when the King of Diamonds was still a hustler—the two creators, Uncle Hawaii and the now-deceased Ziggy Silver, made street art and graffiti.
The pseudonyms were a tool to avoid the cops and vandalism fines. Words written on concrete, fleeting, with no thought of profit, reviews, or audience. Pure spontaneity from a group that called themselves Baggaardsbaroner. Because that’s what we were. It was the view from the bottom of life, and it had never been so beautiful. It was in these late, riotous hours that we wrote our debut novels. Andedrengens Bodegakronik and Selvmord i Sepia.
The manuscripts were accepted by the big publishing house, but the experience was a concentrated broth of everything we felt was wrong with literature and the publishing industry.
Agents, release charts, revenue curves, and soul-binding contracts. Driven by the vitality and stupidity of youth, we thought we could do it better ourselves. And we did. Outside the contract and therefore still under pseudonyms. The books became a success, paving the way for the publishing house and a long line of releases, and the readership that followed us associated the publications with our artistic aliases. It became a formula—Duckburg After Dark—where all the publications existed in the same universe, met each other, and interacted under the cover of smoke and the gasoline-blue miniature clouds of cigarettes.
The books must always stand on their own, but inspired by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s grand superhero serials, we also have a cast of avengers, losers, and fates, all dwelling in the same muck. A game that has become a doctrine. Writers with us must shed their own ego, reinvent themselves. David Bowie, Pelé, Kierkegaard—they all explored their own schizophrenic sides. Because writing is about losing yourself. Living a thousand lives that were never yours. A device to keep art separate from the sometimes mind-numbingly dull, deathly boring shell that you are.
About the books
Baggaardsbaroner’s books all come with a bold visual cover palette and illustrations because we believe that a book should be judged by its cover.
Good stories contain eerie bridges over deep mountains, sharp cliffside coasts, bonfires, and the waves of the sea. They reveal distant mystique and dark existentialism, showing us dreams that only children dare to dream.
Good literature should be enjoyed on cool, rainy days. Because how does life fit together? We don’t believe it does. Literature exists in that space where you lose your head. We humans have a need to divide, categorize, and partition life—to carve it up so we can find meaning. Otherwise, we go insane. That’s why we retell it to each other, like a summary outlining the main points—points we rarely have control over. We find rest in the details, exaggerate them, and at times, idealize, romanticize, or melancholize them beyond recognition.
That’s why we believe in storytelling. It helps elevate the chaos of chance and, for a brief moment, turns life’s short breath into something beyond the meaningless. Our books explore the boundaries of human existence—the impossibility of living. And the kind of philosophical reflections that are best pondered in smoke-filled rooms.
