The Wax Child

Longlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize

From the internationally celebrated author of The Employees and My Work comes an extraordinary, haunting tale of witchcraft and persecution.

In seventeenth-century Denmark, unmarried noblewoman Christenze Kruckow and several other women are accused of witchcraft. They are rumoured to be possessed by the Devil, who comes to them in the form of a tall, headless man and gives them dark powers. It is said they perform unchristian acts and can steal people’s happiness, cause pestilence, illness, or even death. And once the rumour of witchcraft takes hold, they are all in danger of the stake.

Narrated by a wax doll created by Christenze one dark night in 1620, The Wax Child is an unsettling, dizzying horror story about brutality and power, nature and witchcraft, set in the fragile communities of pre-modern Europe.

Deeply researched and steeped in visceral, atmospheric detail, The Wax Child is based on a series of infamous witchcraft trials that took place in Northern Jutland. Full of lush, vivid storytelling and alarmingly rich imagination, Olga Ravn weaves in quotes from original sources, such as letters, court documents, magic spells, and Scandinavian grimoires.

OLGA RAVN is one of Denmark's most celebrated contemporary authors. She is also a poet, a literary critic, and an editor. Her novel The Employees was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize and longlisted for the National Book Awards and the Dublin Literary Award. It has been published in twenty-five territories, and film rights have been sold. Her novel My Work won the Politikens Literature Prize and led to changes in Denmark's maternity laws. It was published in English in 2023 to great critical acclaim. Ravn's work has also been published in the New Yorker, Granta, and The Paris Review. Her latest novel, The Wax Child, is based on a series of real witch trials from the 17th century.

MARTIN AITKEN has translated the work of contemporary Scandinavian writers such as Karl Ove Knausgaard, Peter Høeg, Ida Jessen, and Kim Leine. He was a finalist at the US National Book Awards 2018 and received the PEN America Translation Prize 2019 for his translation of Hanne Ørstavik's Love. His translation of Olga Ravn's The Employees was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize. Aitken lives in Denmark.