Awards

• Commended for DUBLIN Literary Award 2022
• Commended for Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2021
• Short-listed for International Booker Prize 2021

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9781999992880

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Reviews

This beautiful and moving novel, set in a workplace - a spaceship some time in the future - is by turns loving and cold, funny and deliberately prosaic; capable of building a sense of existential horror one minute then quotidian comfort and private grief the next. In deceptively simple prose, threaded on a fully achieved and ambitiously experimental structure, it asks big questions about sentience and the nature of humanity. And about what happiness might be. - 2021 International Booker Prize judges; A pocket-sized space odyssey of uncanny proportion. Olga Ravn creates language as poetic data, seducing us with her soft-natured riot upon our sense of sentience. Aboard a doomed ship, a cycle of monologues from both humans and humanoids (at times indistinguishable) compose with spooky innocence a meditation on the vulnerability of intelligence. A sort of delicate Westworld - compact, crystalline, unnerving. - Yelena Moskovich, author of Virtuoso; If you love plot-heavy, character-driven SFF, look away now. The Employees is set on a spaceship staffed by humans and humanoids looking after some objects found on the planet New Discovery. Are the objects sentient? Are the humanoids becoming more human through contact with them? Is working the same as living? What is the light in the corridor? Revealing its secrets through brief, poetic reports made by the employees to unknown assessors, Olga Ravn's elliptical and evocative novel builds deep effects - threat, desire, grief - from restrained means. It gets under your skin. - Burley Fisher Staff Pick; The Employees considers the work that underlies others' ability to dream, and the ways in which working with numinous objects may inspire a vision of a self-ownership and self-value in that labour, and beyond it... A reminder of the all-too-often inorganic imaginaries of space fiction. - So Mayer; The Employees is a darkish vision - and, of course, not merely one of a possible future but rather of the contemporary workplace.... An intriguing take on identity, function, and 'humanity'. - The Complete Review; Samuel Beckett had he written the script for Alien. - Nicolas Gary, ActuaLitte; Ravn's prose is purposeful and sparse; the reader is merely drip-fed haunting details, such as the child-holograms given to human crew members who have been separated from their own children... Olga Ravn is an author to watch. - The Indie Insider; A radically different intergalactic journey for extreme adventurers. - Just A Word; In this science fiction novel, nourished by poetry and symbolism, Olga Ravn shows how life only has meaning through death. An illuminating message at a time when the apostles of transhumanism are trying to circumvent what they see, wrongly, as an end and not a beginning. - Alice Develey, Le Figaro

This beautiful and moving novel, set in a workplace - a spaceship some time in the future - is by turns loving and cold, funny and deliberately prosaic; capable of building a sense of existential horror one minute then quotidian comfort and private grief the next. In deceptively simple prose, threaded on a fully achieved and ambitiously experimental structure, it asks big questions about sentience and the nature of humanity. And about what happiness might be. - 2021 International Booker Prize judges; A pocket-sized space odyssey of uncanny proportion. Olga Ravn creates language as poetic data, seducing us with her soft-natured riot upon our sense of sentience. Aboard a doomed ship, a cycle of monologues from both humans and humanoids (at times indistinguishable) compose with spooky innocence a meditation on the vulnerability of intelligence. A sort of delicate Westworld - compact, crystalline, unnerving. - Yelena Moskovich, author of Virtuoso; If you love plot-heavy, character-driven SFF, look away now. The Employees is set on a spaceship staffed by humans and humanoids looking after some objects found on the planet New Discovery. Are the objects sentient? Are the humanoids becoming more human through contact with them? Is working the same as living? What is the light in the corridor? Revealing its secrets through brief, poetic reports made by the employees to unknown assessors, Olga Ravn's elliptical and evocative novel builds deep effects - threat, desire, grief - from restrained means. It gets under your skin. - Burley Fisher Staff Pick; The Employees considers the work that underlies others' ability to dream, and the ways in which working with numinous objects may inspire a vision of a self-ownership and self-value in that labour, and beyond it... A reminder of the all-too-often inorganic imaginaries of space fiction. - So Mayer; The Employees is a darkish vision - and, of course, not merely one of a possible future but rather of the contemporary workplace.... An intriguing take on identity, function, and 'humanity'. - The Complete Review; Samuel Beckett had he written the script for Alien. - Nicolas Gary, ActuaLitte; Ravn's prose is purposeful and sparse; the reader is merely drip-fed haunting details, such as the child-holograms given to human crew members who have been separated from their own children... Olga Ravn is an author to watch. - The Indie Insider; A radically different intergalactic journey for extreme adventurers. - Just A Word; In this science fiction novel, nourished by poetry and symbolism, Olga Ravn shows how life only has meaning through death. An illuminating message at a time when the apostles of transhumanism are trying to circumvent what they see, wrongly, as an end and not a beginning. - Alice Develey, Le Figaro

Author Information

OLGA RAVN (b. 1986) is a Danish novelist and poet. Her novel Celestine appeared to critical acclaim in 2015. She is also a literary critic and has written for Politiken and several other Danish publications. Alongside Johanne Lykke Holm, she runs the feminist performance group and writing school Hekseskolen. MARTIN AITKEN has translated numerous novels from Danish and Norwegian, including works by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Peter Hoeg, Ida Jessen, and Kim Leine. He was a finalist at the U.S. National Book Awards 2018 and received the PEN America Translation Prize 2019 for his translation of Hanne Orstavik's Love.

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