Winner of the 2020 Politiken Literature Prize
From the acclaimed author of the International Booker Prize–shortlisted literary sensation, The Employees, comes a radical, funny, and mercilessly honest novel about motherhood.
Anna is utterly lost. Still in shock after the birth of her son, she moves to snowbound Stockholm with her newborn and boyfriend, where a chasm soon opens between the couple. Lonely and isolated, Anna reads too many internet articles and shops for clothes she cannot afford. To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, she must read and write herself back into her proper place in the world.
My Work is a fervent, intimate, and compulsive examination of the relationship between motherhood, writing, and everyday life. In a mesmerizing, propulsive blend of prose, poetry, journal entries, and letters, Olga Ravn probes the pain, postpartum depression, housework, shopping, mundanity, and anxiety of motherhood, all the while celebrating the unbounded that comes from the love in a parent and child relationship—and rediscovering oneself through art.
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, andThe Paris Review. Her latest novel, The Wax Child, based on a series of real witch trials from the 17th century, was published in Denmark in September 2023.
JENNIFER RUSSELL is a translator living in Copenhagen. She received an American-Scandinavian Foundation Award for her co-translation of Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild’s All the Birds in the Sky in 2020. With Sophia Hersi Smith, she has translated fiction and poetry by Danish writers such as Tove Ditlevsen, Olga Ravn, and Marianne Larsen. Their translations have appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Asymptote, EuropeNow, Poetry International, and on stage.
SOPHIA HERSI SMITH is a translator living in Copenhagen. She received an American-Scandinavian Foundation Award for her co-translation of Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild’s All the Birds in the Sky in 2020. With Jennifer Russell, she has translated fiction and poetry by Danish writers such as Tove Ditlevsen, Olga Ravn, and Marianne Larsen. Their translations have appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Asymptote, EuropeNow, Poetry International, and on stage.
