Praise for My Work

This brilliant and unflinching work deserves to be a classic

– Publishers Weekly

This novel from Olga Ravn, this new golden notebook, needs to be read by absolutely anyone who has known the quiet madness and claustrophobic happiness of the interior, especially mothers who also long for a life of literature. But this novel absolutely needs to be read by everyone else as well. Oh Olga Ravn, always inventing new forms, you are a genius, how do you do it?

– Kate Zambreno

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

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 addictiveOlga Ravn has not only added a highly personal and literary page-turner to her body of work: she has made a brave and important contribution to literary history and social debate, which since the 1970s has been in dire need of writing that incorporates lived experience

– Børsen

Olga Ravn writes dazzlingly about the task of motherhood and the task of writing. Her poems feel as though they were written in the maternity ward. 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… perhaps “this text is meant to keep me alive”

– Politiken

Ravn traces the threads of motherhood back into a more-than-human past… Luminous

– Jyllands Posten

Praise for The Employees

The Employees is a clever exploration of what it means to be a person – and an excellent satire of corporate lingo

– Mahita Gajanan, Time 100 must-read books of 2022

[A]n unforgettable novel about the psychic costs of labor under capitalism… Dreamlike and sensual, The Employees shouldn’t be missed

– Esquire

The most striking aspect of this weird, beautiful, and occasionally disgusting novel is not, as its subtitle implies, its portrayal of working life on the spaceship... What The Employees captures best is humanity’s ambivalence about life itself, its sticky messes and unappealing functions, the goo that connects us to everything that crawls and mindlessly self-propagates, not to mention that obliterating payoff at the end of it all

– Laura Miller, New York Review of Books

Ravn asks us to envision a future in which the machines, rather than the humans that create and maintain them, lead the workers’ revolution

– Lauren Nelson, Los Angeles Review of Books

The Employees is a short book, but it contains multitudes. Ravn’s open love, pity, and compassion for her strange yet familiar creations is poetry

– John Crowley, The Boston Review

God died, and soon the Earth will too, but in this Danish dystopian novel told in vignettes from laborers floating on a spaceship in the 22nd century, work remains

– Jacob Rosenberg, Mother Jones

Everything I'm looking for in a novel. I was obsessed from the first page to the last. A strange, beautiful, deeply intelligent and provocative investigation into humanity. The Employees is an alarmingly brilliant work of art

– Max Porter

Few stories today are as sublimely strange and their own thing as Olga Ravn’s The Employees. This disorienting, mind-bending expanse recalls as much the poetry of Aase Berg as the workplace fiction of Thomas Ligotti. Something marvelously sui generis for the jaded

– Jeff Vandermeer

The voices of humans and humanoids are almost indistinguishable as they describe the disturbing dreams, imaginary smells, skin complaints and wild thoughts that seem to be provoked by these mysterious things, which hum, or ooze resin, or lay eggs… One humanoid co-worker refers to the parts of the Six-Thousand Ship where the humans are quartered as “a museum, a prison, a brothel … a nursery”. There may still be division in Ravn’s twenty-second century, but humans and humanoids alike answer to a distant, faceless corporation. If that’s a fate worth avoiding, there is still plenty of work for us all to do

– Richard Lea, TLS

What might result if Ursula K. Le Guin and Nell Zink had a baby

– Tank Magazine

The Employees is not only a disconcertingly quotidian space opera; it’s also an audacious satire of corporate language and the late-capitalist workplace, and a winningly abstracted investigation into what it means to be human

– Justine Jordan, The Guardian

The Employees is a strangely affecting work of speculative fiction which brings Vuillard’s war of the poor to the heavens. Irrespective of who wins the Booker International prize, they can be glad of the company they have kept on this ambitious and innovative shortlist

– Michael Cronin, The Irish Times

Stunning and poetic… All I want to do is quote the many highlighted bits that I keep returning to on a regular basis, lines of poetry that I keep repeating to myself

– Barbara Halla, Asymptote

Beautiful, sinister, gripping. A tantalising puzzle you can never quite solve. All the reviews say that the novel is, ultimately, about what it means to be human. What makes it exceptional, however, is the way it explores the richness and strangeness of being non-human

– Mark Haddon

Olga Ravn’s critique of life governed by work and the logic of productivity is long overdue. Through poetic insight and emotional eloquence, brilliantly delivered in Martin Aitken’s translation from Danish, she has created a frightening, astonishing literary experience

– Steph Glover, It’s Freezing in LA!

A pocket-sized space odyssey of uncanny proportion. Olga Ravn creates language as poetic data, seducing us with her soft-natured riot upon our sense of sentience. Aboard a doomed ship, a cycle of monologues from both humans and humanoids (at times indistinguishable) compose with spooky innocence a meditation on the vulnerability of intelligence. A sort of delicate Westworld – compact, crystalline, unnerving

– Yelena Moskovich, author of Virtuoso

Revealing its secrets through brief, poetic reports made by the employees to unknown assessors, Olga Ravn's elliptical and evocative novel builds deep effects – threat, desire, grief – from restrained means. It gets under your skin

– Burley Fisher Staff Pick

The Employees considers the work that underlies others’ ability to dream, and the ways in which working with numinous objects may inspire a vision of a self-ownership and self-value in that labour, and beyond it… A reminder of the all-too-often inorganic imaginaries of space fiction

– So Mayer

The Employees is a darkish vision – and, of course, not merely one of a possible future but rather of the contemporary workplace… An intriguing take on identity, function, and ‘humanity’

– The Complete Review

Samuel Beckett had he written the script for Alien

– Nicolas Gary, ActuaLitté

Ravn’s prose is purposeful and sparse; the reader is merely drip-fed haunting details, such as the child-holograms given to human crew members who have been separated from their own children… Olga Ravn is an author to watch

– The Indie Insider

A radically different intergalactic journey for extreme adventurers

– Just A Word

This beautiful and moving novel, set in a workplace – a spaceship some time in the future – is by turns loving and cold, funny and deliberately prosaic; capable of building a sense of existential horror one minute then quotidian comfort and private grief the next. In deceptively simple prose, threaded on a fully achieved and ambitiously experimental structure, it asks big questions about sentience and the nature of humanity. And about what happiness might be

– 2021 International Booker Prize judges