Author(s): Olga Ravn (Author) , Sophia Hersi Smith (Translated by) , Jennifer Russell (Translated by)

Novel | Translated fiction | Denmark | Lolli Editions | 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize long list

After giving birth, Anna is utterly lost. She and her family move to the unfamiliar, snowy city of Stockholm. Anxiety threatens to completely engulf the new mother, who obsessively devours online news and compulsively buys clothes she can't afford. To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, Anna forces herself to read and write. My Work is a novel about the unique and fundamental experience of giving birth, mixing different literary forms - fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, and letters - to explore the relationship between motherhood, work, individuality, and literature.

After giving birth, Anna is utterly lost. She and her family move to the unfamiliar, snowy city of Stockholm. Anxiety threatens to completely engulf the new mother, who obsessively devours online news and compulsively buys clothes she can't afford.

To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, Anna forces herself to read and write. My Work is a novel about the unique and fundamental experience of giving birth, mixing different literary forms - fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, and letters - to explore the relationship between motherhood, work, individuality, and literature.

>>Eighth Beginning (an extract).

Reviews:

This novel from Olga Ravn, this new golden notebook, needs to be read by absolutely anyone who has known the quiet madness and claustrophobic happiness of the interior, especially mothers who also long for a life of literature. But this novel absolutely needs to be read by everyone else as well. Oh Olga Ravn, always inventing new forms, you are a genius, how do you do it? – Kate Zambreno

My Work is ferocious, horrific, elegant, insightful, irreverent, and funny. Can a woman still be a person after motherhood? Of course not, Ravn argues, or rather, admits. And in prose, poems, and journal entries, she documents all the absurdity and repulsiveness of growing a creature in your body and then raising it. It is a magnificent and satisfying meditation. One of the most honest and revelatory works of fiction about motherhood I have ever read. Ravn’s writing is ecstatic, philosophical, and addictive. – Heather O’Neill

My Work is ferocious, horrific, elegant, insightful, irreverent, and funny. Can a woman still be a person after motherhood? Of course not, Ravn argues, or rather, admits. And in prose, poems, and journal entries, she documents all the absurdity and repulsiveness of growing a creature in your body and then raising it. It is a magnificent and satisfying meditation. One of the most honest and revelatory works of fiction about motherhood I have ever read. Ravn’s writing is ecstatic, philosophical, and addictiveOlga Ravn has not only added a highly personal and literary page-turner to her body of work: she has made a brave and important contribution to literary history and social debate, which since the 1970s has been in dire need of writing that incorporates lived experience. – Børsen

Olga Ravn writes dazzlingly about the task of motherhood and the task of writing. Her poems feel as though they were written in the maternity ward. Reading Ravn’s book, you run through the whole gamut of human emotion, as though you too were a new mother: tears, laughter, anger, fear, pain, frustration. This is powerful writing that’s hard to put down… perhaps “this text is meant to keep me alive”. – Politiken

Ravn traces the threads of motherhood back into a more-than-human past… Luminous. – Jyllands Posten