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Shortlisted for the International Booker prize and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, The Employees reshuffles a sci-fi voyage into a riotously original existential nightmare
Longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award
Funny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes strangely and deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids.Olga Ravn’s prose is chilling, crackling, exhilarating, and foreboding. The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity. It was shortlisted for the the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize.
Olga Ravn
Olga Ravn (born 1986) is a Danish novelist and poet. In collaboration with Danish publisher Gyldendal she edited a selection of Tove Ditlevsen's texts and books that relaunched Ditlevsen's readership worldwide. Her novel The Employees was on the shortlist for the Booker Prize in 2021, and The Wax Child was on the longlist for the Booker International Prize and the shortlist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Translation in 2026.
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Martin Aitken
Translated by
Martin Aitken’s translations of Scandinavian literature number some thirty-five books. His work has appeared on the shortlists of the International DUBLIN Literary Award (2017) and the US National Book Awards (2018), as well as the 2021 International Booker Prize. He received the PEN America Translation Prize in 2019.
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