The Employees

'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 
 
On the Six-Thousand Ship, things have started to feel changed. Since bringing aboard a number of strange objects from a newly discovered planet, the crew – both human and humanoid – have begun to feel a yearning. They want to be near the objects, to feel them pressed against their skin, but they also all now feel a curious new hunger for home: Earth, that place many cannot even remember. 
 
The Board of Directors are eager to understand more, and so instruct a commission to interview each of the employees. Those who are born dream of soil, the smell of warm asphalt, the sound of animals and birds. Those who are made know only what is programmed, and yet feel it deeply, truly. As their testimonies accumulate, a tapestry of longing and quiet rebellion emerges, blurring the lines between work and life, between human and machine. 
 
The Employees was the breakout novel from one of the most celebrated authors in world literature, and is now seen as a masterpiece of twenty-first century literary science fiction. In stark, pristine prose, Olga Ravn forms a timeless meditation on productivity, pleasure and what the far-flung future might miss. 
 
'Beautiful, sinister, gripping. A tantalising puzzle you can never quite solve.' Mark Haddon

Olga Ravn (Author) 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. Martin Aitken (Translator) Martin Aitken has translated the works of many Scandinavian writers, among them Karl Ove Knausgaard, Helle Helle, Hanne Ørstavik and Olga Ravn. He lives in Denmark.

On the Six-Thousand Ship, things have started to feel changed. Since bringing aboard a number of strange objects from a newly discovered planet, the crew – both human and humanoid – have begun to feel a yearning. They want to be near the objects, to feel them pressed against their skin, but they also all now feel a curious new hunger for home: Earth, that place many cannot even remember. 
 
The Board of Directors are eager to understand more, and so instruct a commission to interview each of the employees. Those who are born dream of soil, the smell of warm asphalt, the sound of animals and birds. Those who are made know only what is programmed, and yet feel it deeply, truly. As their testimonies accumulate, a tapestry of longing and quiet rebellion emerges, blurring the lines between work and life, between human and machine. 
 
The Employees was the breakout novel from one of the most celebrated authors in world literature, and is now seen as a masterpiece of twenty-first century literary science fiction. In stark, pristine prose, Olga Ravn forms a timeless meditation on productivity, pleasure and what the far-flung future might miss.

My Work

Olga Ravn (Author) 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. Jennifer Russell (Translator) Jennifer Russell is a translator living in Copenhagen. Together with Sophia Hersi Smith, she has translated fiction and poetry by Danish writers such as Olga Ravn, Tove Ditlevsen and Solvej Balle. Sophia Hersi Smith (Translator) Sophia Hersi Smith is a translator living in Copenhagen. Together with Jennifer Russell, she has translated fiction and poetry by Danish writers such as Olga Ravn, Tove Ditlevsen and Solvej Balle.

Olga Ravn

Martin Aitken

The Wax Child proves Olga Ravn’s ahead of the game. She's the strangest - and best - young novelist in Europe

Something truly special. A wonderfully weird novel full of lines that will rattle around in your brain.

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. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that this haunting, gripping and singular historical novel cast a spell on us.

The International Booker Prize 2026 judges

Olga Ravn is a master and an alchemist. There's nobody else doing quite what she does

I gulped The Wax Child down and dreamed wild dreams about it. Just brilliant.

An incantation that explores womanhood, motherhood and bodily autonomy. Martin Aitken’s mesmerising, exquisitely precise translation is, literally, breathtaking. To be read in one sitting, on a dark winter’s night

The Irish Times – Books of the year 2025

Gorgeously mercurial. The best historical fiction can turn the driest archival fact into revelation, and here is proof.

A subversive tapestry stitched together with poetry, beauty and violence

An instant classic that feels passed down from centuries ago and yet utterly unique, fresh, and modern. Another stunning, surreal journey from an author who seems to never disappoint

Drawing on folklore, superstition, gossip and historic truth, frequently blending the borders between all four, The Wax Child weaves its strange awful magic like a spell

A spellbinding tale of loss and longing. A magnificent book. A true masterpiece of both substance and style.

Sinister magic and folk-horror combine into a novel that is as creepingly atmospheric as it is formally impressive.

Dark and strange and beautiful and completely gripping

The Wax Child has emerged from an imagination that is wild, visionary, and absolutely original. It is beautiful, eerie, sublime, and, like a fingerprint or a snowflake, only one of its kind. Olga Ravn is a roof-raisingly brilliant writer

Olga Ravn tugs skillfully at the treads of reality, subtly distorting events to reveal hidden, dislocated truths

Olga Ravn descends into a dark historical world of fear and danger, nightmarish fantasy, sordid suffering and blood. Magic is portrayed as a real power not only to be feared, but aspired to by an underclass of disadvantaged yet defiant women

Malcolm Gaskill, author of The Ruin of All Witches

It was a black night in the year 1620 when Christenze Krukow made the wax child, when she melted down beeswax and set it in the image of a small human. For days, she carried it tucked beneath her arm, shaping it with the warmth of her flesh, giving it life. She fashioned for it eyes and ears that cannot open, and yet – it watches and listens. 
 
It looks on as Christenze is haunted by rumour, it hears what the people whisper. It sees how, in the candlelight, she gazes with love at her friends, and hears the things they say in the shadows. It knows pine forest, misty fjord and the crackle of the burning pyre. It observes the violence in men’s eyes and the cruelty of their laws. In time, it begins to understand that once a suspicion of witchcraft has taken hold, it can prove impossible to shake… 
 
Based on an infamous seventeenth century Danish witch trial, The Wax Child is the extraordinary new novel from Olga Ravn, one of the most acclaimed and original writers at work today: a mesmerising, frightening vision of a time when witches and magic were as real to the human mind as soil and seawater.

Olga Ravn

Praise for The Wax Child

The Wax Child proves Olga Ravn’s ahead of the game. She's the strangest - and best - young novelist in Europe

Something truly special. A wonderfully weird novel full of lines that will rattle around in your brain.

**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. It is hardly an exaggeration ...**

The Wax Child proves Olga Ravn’s ahead of the game. She's the strangest - and best - young novelist in Europe

Something truly special. A wonderfully weird novel full of lines that will rattle around in your brain.

**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. It is hardly an exaggeration ...**

The Wax Child proves Olga Ravn’s ahead of the game. She's the strangest - and best - young novelist in Europe

Something truly special. A wonderfully weird novel full of lines that will rattle around in your brain.

**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. It is hardly an exaggeration ...**

Books by Olga Ravn

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