Danish author Olga Ravn, 36, made the International Booker shortlist in 2021 with her first book to be translated into English, The Employees, an experimental novel about a partly humanoid space crew. Fans include Max Porter and Mark Haddon; a French critic called it Alien as told by Samuel Beckett. Her new novel, My Work, is her second book to be translated into English. Mixing fiction, essay and poetry, it follows Anna, an isolated young writer navigating pregnancy and motherhood as well as mental illness and the medical system. Ravn spoke from her home in Copenhagen, where she was born and raised.
Where did My Work begin?
I started writing it on my phone late at night in hospital after giving birth to my first child in a very complicated delivery. I became obsessed with documenting what was happening – I was really weirded out and writing was the only place I felt a little like myself. Later, I realised I had postpartum depression and I asked myself how, from an artistic point of view, I could stay true to the experience; it was important to me that readers who had experienced something similar would feel I had respected it. When strangers ask me how much of the book is true, I don’t know how to answer. I wanted the reader to have an experience of extreme intimacy, to feel that everything is being shown – but that’s not autobiography, it’s technique.
What drew you to the book’s hybrid form?
In writing school I’d been taught that a great novel is a third-person psychological portrait of an individual who learns something and either perishes or is victorious. This novel is published every day; I tried to write one and it felt dead on the page. Reading Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook at night when the baby slept changed everything. It was like a lifejacket. She’s struggling with linearity; one response to that could be fragmentation, but that’s a broken form, and she’s interested in something more holistic. She takes seriously how the experience of motherhood might influence a novel’s form.
Why did you choose the title My Work?
I wanted to simply say we can’t consider only paid work as work. Because where do new citizens come from? Not thin air – you have to raise them and build them out of your flesh. I also wanted the title to have authority, almost in a teasing way, because I knew I was entering a tradition of motherhood books shelved in a lesser category than, you know, big literary works about the second world war.
The novel is candid about maternal ambivalence. Did you worry what your children might make of it when they’re older?
Going to teacher-parent conferences did give me a little social anxiety. When the children were very small, it felt like the book would ruin something. But time passes, they don’t really care and you still have to make dinner; thousands and thousands of meals together are so much stronger than one book. I’m really happy I wrote it because the book became a vessel for shame, which meant it wasn’t in my relationship with my children. I think we put so much pressure on that parent-child relationship – it’s almost like a cult. One undercurrent in My Work is about realising that learning how to love a child isn’t something that happens in a second. That’s definitely taboo, because there’s a black-and-white view that says even just talking about what it is to love a child means you’re putting that love into question.
How did Danish readers respond?
After I did a television interview I got flooded with DMs and very long messages – maybe 1,000 – from people telling me traumatic stuff about [giving birth]. Even my own grandmother called. My friend said: “Perhaps it wasn’t OK that I gave birth in the hospital corridor?” A lot of parents come into parenthood with trauma and that isn’t necessary. I wrote an op-ed in which I was very open about having received special treatment at hospital for postpartum depression. I said everyone should be able to access this basic care. That just exploded. I had a meeting with the health minister and began working with NGOs. There was a vote in parliament and millions [of kroner] were earmarked for maternity wards, but I’ve since become jaded because the money never arrived; bureaucracy ate it.
What was the impact for you when The Employees came out in English?
I never really thought I’d have readers outside the Nordic countries. The translation [by Martin Aitken] came out in the middle of the pandemic, so nothing really happened and I had no expectations anyway. Then the International Booker nomination came out of nowhere – I didn’t even know the longlist was being announced – and it just snowballed. It’s out in 24 languages now. Here, My Work was the book that put my name on the map; The Employees got good reviews, but didn’t sell very well. It was wonderful to see another route for it.
Tell us what you’ve been reading lately.
One of my favourite Danish writers, Helle Helle, has a new book out [Hafni fortæller (Hafni Says)], which is always an event – she’s the master. I’ve been reading a lot about cosmology in the middle ages – books like Benjamin Anderson’s Cosmos and Community in Early Medieval Art – because I was writing a horror novel [Voksbarnet, The Wax Child] about witch burnings during the Danish enlightenment.
What did you read growing up?
The violence of fairytales interested me. I remember being shaken out of myself, quite young, when I heard a recording of Paul Celan’s Death Fugue. Everyone here reads Inger Christensen at school. She’s one of the greatest Danish writers – I’d recommend her poem Alphabet, a sort of ecological liturgy about the atom bomb. As a child I did nothing but read. I tried Freud when I was 10; the librarian just gave me a look. I understood nothing but wanted to know everything.
• My Work by Olga Ravn (translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell) is published by Lolli Editions (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
