Olga Ravn

Martin Aitken

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There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die

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 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

Wuthering Heights

The Brontë Sisters (Boxed Set)

Wuthering Heights (Vintage Classics Bronte Series)

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.

The Wax Child

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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.**

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

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

Addictive and unsettling

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

About Olga Ravn

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