Ravn, Olga
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1986- ) Danish poet, journalist and author, active from around 2008, initially concentrating on poetry. Her first novel, the untranslated Celestine (2015), is a ghost story. She is of sf interest for Die Ansatte (2018; trans Martin Aitken as The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century 2020), set partly on primarily on Six Thousand Ship, a Starship currently orbiting the planet New Discovery. The ship's crew, both human and Android, have taken on board an array of enigmatic Alien artifacts, whose architectonically complex enticingness generates pain and pleasure in the variegated crew, long separated from Earth. The text of the tale is made up of their increasingly disturbed and disturbing reports back to the Earth corporation that has funded them; there are increasing hints that the androids, as mysterious in their slime-based fecundation as the gnomic objects, may be at the point of demonstrating the obsolescence of the idea that human flesh-puppets have much future in space. The original novel, written in conjunction with "Consumed Future Spewed up as Present", a 2018 installation in Copenhagen by Lea Guldditte Hestelund (1983- ), conveys a sense of the risk of interactions between tactility and aesthetic cognition in the crew's attempts interactively to apprehend (see Perception) shapes whose meanings may be as irretrievable to humans as (for instance) the spomeniks in Last and First Men (2017) directed by Jóhann Jóhannsson.
Ravn's third novel, Mit arbejde ["My Work"] (2020), draws metafictional parallels between its protagonist's postpartum depression and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Or, the New Prometheus (1818). [JC]
Olga Ravn
born Copenhagen, Denmark: 27 September 1986
works (selected)
- Celestine (Copenhagen, Denmark: Gyldendal, 2015) [hb/]
- Die Ansatte (Copenhagen, Denmark: Gyldendal, 2018) [hb/]
- The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century (London: Lolli Editions, 2020) [trans by Martin Aitken of the above: pb/]
- Mit arbejde ["My Work"] (Copenhagen, Denmark: Gyldendal, 2020) [hb/]
links
- Olga Ravn (blog in Danish)
- Internet Speculative Fiction Database
previous versions of this entry