Olga Ravn and Martin Aitken on The Employees
Author Olga Ravn and translator Martin Aitken on the jumbled statements in The Employees and what it’s like to be longlisted for the International Booker Prize
Olga Ravn
Olga Ravn is one of Denmark’s most celebrated contemporary authors
Her novel The Employees was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2021, the Ursula K.Le Guin Prize and longlisted for the National Book Awards and the Dublin Literary Award. Her novel My Work won the Politikens Literature Prize in 2021 and led to changes in the country’s maternity rights.
She has also written shorter pieces for the New Yorker, the Paris Review and Granta.
Her novel The Wax Child, in an English language translation by Martin Aitken (who also translated The Employees) was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.
Author photo © Lærke Posselt
Every word in The Wax Child feels spontaneous, every scene alive, as if Ravn and Aitken had lived and breathed its mysterious atmospheres in order to deliver them to us
— The International Booker Prize 2026 judges on The Wax Child
All nominated books
A chilling story about female power and brutality, nature and magic, and a dizzying insight into a 17th-century worldview
Olga Ravn explores what it really means to be human, while questioning the logic of productivity and a life governed by work
