My Work

From the acclaimed author of The Employees, a radical, funny, and mercilessly honest novel about motherhood. 

After giving birth, Anna is utterly lost. She and her family move to the unfamiliar, snowy city of Stockholm. Anxiety threatens to completely engulf Anna, who obsessively devours online news and compulsively orders clothes she can’t afford. To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, she forces herself to read and write.

My Work is a novel about the unique and fundamental experience of giving birth, mixing different literary forms―fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, and letters―to explore the relationship between motherhood, work, individuality, and literature.“Olga Ravn writes dazzlingly about the work of motherhood and the work of writing. Reading Ravn’s book, you run through the whole gamut of human emotion, as though you too were a new mother: tears, laughter, anger, fear, pain, frustration. This is powerful writing that’s hard to put down.”―Politiken

Olga Ravn (born 1986) is a Danish novelist and poet. In collaboration with Danish publisher Gyldendal she edited a selection of Tove Ditlevsen’s texts and books that relaunched Ditlevsen’s readership worldwide. Her novel The Employees was on the shortlist for the Booker Prize in 2021, and The Wax Child was on the longlist for the Booker International Prize and the shortlist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Translation in 2026.

 

Sophia Hersi Smith is a translator living in Copenhagen. Together with Jennifer Russell, she has translated fiction and poetry by Danish writers such as Tove Ditlevsen, Marianne Larsen, Olga Ravn, and Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild.

Jennifer Russell is a translator living in Copenhagen. Together with Sophia Hersi Smith, she has translated fiction and poetry by Danish writers such as Tove Ditlevsen, Marianne Larsen, Olga Ravn, and Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild.