My Work
Olga Ravn
Translated from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE FOR SMALL PRESSES
WINNER OF THE POLITIKEN LITERATURE PRIZE
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 the new mother, who obsessively devours online news and compulsively buys clothes she can’t afford. To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, Anna 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.
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. Ravn’s writing is ecstatic, philosophical, and addictive. —Heather O’Neill
OLGA RAVN (b. 1986) is one of Denmark’s 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, originally published in Danish as Mit arbejde, won the Politiken Literature Prize in 2020. In collaboration with Danish publisher Gyldendal, Ravn edited a selection of Tove Ditlevsen’s texts and books that relaunched Ditlevsen’s readership worldwide. She has also worked as a critic, teacher, and translator. Ravn lives in Copenhagen.