My Work

'This novel from Olga Ravn, this new golden notebook, needs to be read by absolutely anyone who has known the quiet madness and claustrophobic happiness of the interior, especially mothers who also long for a life of literature. But this novel absolutely needs to be read by everyone else as well. Oh Olga Ravn, always inventing new forms, you are a genius, how do you do it?' Kate Zambreno; 'My Work is ferocious, horrific, elegant, insightful, irreverent, and funny. Can a woman still be a person after motherhood? Of course not, Ravn argues, or rather, admits. And in prose, poems, and journal entries, she documents all the absurdity and repulsiveness of growing a creature in your body and then raising it. It is a magnificent and satisfying meditation. One of the most honest and revelatory works of fiction about motherhood I have ever read. Ravns writing is ecstatic, philosophical, and addictive.' Heather ONeill

OLGA RAVN (b. 1986) is one of Denmarks most celebrated contemporary authors. Her novel The Employees, translated by Martin Aitken, was nominated for numerous prizes, including the International Booker Prize and the inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. TIME Magazine named THE EMPLOYEES one of the 100 Must-Read Books of 2022. MY WORK won the Politiken Literature Prize in 2020. In collaboration with Danish publisher Gyldendal, Ravn edited a selection of Tove Ditlevsens texts and books that relaunched Ditlevsens readership worldwide. She has also worked as a critic, teacher, and translator. Ravn lives in Copenhagen. SOPHIA HERSI SMITH and JENNIFER RUSSELL are translators living in Copenhagen. They received an American-Scandinavian Foundation Award for their co-translation of Rakel Haslund-Gjerrilds All the Birds in the Sky in 2020. Their translations have appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Asymptote, EuropeNow, Poetry International, and on stage.