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Olga Ravn

Olga Ravn

Bukhman International Booker Prize 2027 judge

Prizes judged

Olga Ravn is one of Denmark’s most celebrated contemporary authors

In Danish, she has published four novels, two poetry collections and an artist’s book. Her novel The Employees, translated by Martin Aitken, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2021 and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, and longlisted for the National Book Award and the Dublin Literary Award. It has been published in 26 territories. 
  
Her novel My Work won the Politiken’s Literature Prize in 2021 and led to changes in Denmark’s maternity laws. It was published in English in September 2023 to great critical acclaim in a translation by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell. 

Ravn’s most recent novel, The Wax Child, was published in English in 2025 in a translation by Martin Aitken. It was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. The novel prompted the Telegraph to call her ‘the strangest – and best – young novelist in Europe’ and is being published in 20 territories. 
 
As a translator, Ravn has translated Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath, among others, into Danish. As an editor she played a central role in the relaunch of Tove Ditlevesen’s work. In addition, she has written shorter pieces for the New Yorker, The Paris Review and Granta. She lives in Copenhagen. 

By reading literature from outside of our respective home countries, our consciousness and understanding of not only the world but of language and literature itself is deepened

Olga Ravn, Bukhman International Booker Prize 2027 judge

Read more on Olga Ravn

The Wax Child

An extract from The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken

‘I am a child shaped in beeswax. I am made like a doll the size of a human forearm. They have given me hair and fingernail parings from the person who is to suffer. I was borne by my mistress for forty weeks under her right arm as if I was a proper child, and my wax was softened by her warmth.’ 

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

Front cover of The Wax Child
A chilling story about female power and brutality, nature and magic, and a dizzying insight into a 17th-century worldview
The Employees
Olga Ravn explores what it really means to be human, while questioning the logic of productivity and a life governed by work