Of Darkness

Josefine Klougart (b. 1985) is considered to be one of the major voices of contemporary Scandinavian literature. She made her debut in 2010 with the novel Stigninger og fald (Rise and Fall), which was nominated for the prestigious Nordic Council Literature Prize. A year later, Klougart was awarded the Danish Crown Prince Couple’s Stardust Prize, with the committee calling her “one of the most important writers, not just of her generation, but of her time.” Her second novel, Hallerne (The Halls), published in 2011, was adapted for the stage at Aarhus Theatre in February 2012 by Swedish director Annika Silkeberg. In February 2012, Klougart published her third novel, One of Us Is Sleeping, for which she again received a Nordic Council Literature Prize nomination, becoming the first Danish author ever to have two of her first three books nominated for Scandinavia's most prestigious award. Her fourth novel, On Darkness, appeared in 2014 to massive critical acclaim throughout Scandinavia. Klougart’s writing has been compared variously to that of Joan Didion, Anne Carson, and Virginia Woolf. In 2016, her novels One of Us Is Sleeping and On Darkness will appear for the first time in English, published by Open Letter Books and Deep Vellum Publishing respectively.

Martin Aitken is an award-winning translator of Danish literature. His work includes novels by such authors such as Peter Høeg, Helle Helle, Pia Juul, and Kim Leine, and he has been awarded the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Nadia Christensen Translation Prize, and was longlisted for both the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He is currently translating from the Norwegian of the sixth book in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s highly acclaimed My Struggle sextology.