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
Martin Aitken
Martin Aitken is an acclaimed translator of many Scandinavian writers, among them Karl Ove Knausgaard, Helle Helle, Hanne Ørstavik and Olga Ravn
He received the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Nadia Christensen Prize in 2012, the PEN America Translation Prize in 2019, and the US National Translation Award in Prose in 2022.
He has been nominated for the International Booker Prize twice, for his English language translations of books by Danish author Olga Ravn. He was shortlisted in 2021 for The Employees, and was longlisted in 2026 for The Wax Child.
He lives in Denmark.
Author photo supplied by Viking
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
Olga Ravn explores what it really means to be human, while questioning the logic of productivity and a life governed by work
By Olga Ravn
Translated by Martin Aitken
A chilling story about female power and brutality, nature and magic, and a dizzying insight into a 17th-century worldview
By Olga Ravn
Translated by Martin Aitken
