After a personal crisis, he spent a year working as a sailor on wealthy people's yachts,[2] before returning to graduate with a Master of Arts in Literature from the University of Copenhagen in 1984.

[3] Over the next five years he wrote and published the short story collection Tales of Night, and the novels: Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow (1992), Borderliners (1993).

[3] Norwegian author Jan Kjærstad defended the book, saying: "it surprises me that a novel written by someone of Peter Høeg’s calibre, with such great intelligence, so much thought and originality, should be treated to such outpourings of pettiness and virulence.

"[8] In October 2007, the Danish literary critic Poul Behrendt published a book entitled Den Hemmelige Note: Ti kapitler om små ting der forandrer alt (The Secret Note: Ten Chapters on Little Things That Change Everything), in which he explains that the cold reception of The Quiet Girl was due to its complexity and scope, which the critics, according to Behrendt, didn't understand.

While Miss Smilla, for instance, was classified as Nordic noir,[11] The Susan Effect featured magical elements such as in the case of the Svendsen family, which possessed one superpower or another in the narrative.