Olga Ravn: ‘I’m very mistrustful of writers who don’t read’
The writer talks to Anahit Behrooz about feminist rewriting, fragmenting the novel and fighting loneliness.
Ahead of the release of her latest novel The Wax Child – for which she joined us at our London Literature Festival in November 2025 – writer Olga Ravn discussed her ‘nerdy’ childhood, understanding motherhood through art, and how ‘all language holds a view of the world’, with Anahit Behrooz.
Ever since she was a child, Olga Ravn has been fascinated by witches. ‘I [was always] asking my friends if we could do witchy stuff. Like, could we make some sort of coven?’ she laughs. As an adult the fascination never quite went away; witches haunted her path, and she theirs. After founding the feminist performance group and writing school Hekseskole with Swedish writer Johanne Lykke Naderehvandi, she began noticing that the trains that ran along the line near her house in Copenhagen went to the same terminus, a town called Køge famous for its early modern witch trials. One day, she boarded the train, and out of that journey was born her latest novel The Wax Child, a retelling of a 17th century witch trial surrounding noblewoman Christenze Krukow, told through the eerie, observant eye of a small doll fashioned from wax and passed around Krukow and her community of women.
The Wax Child was originally commissioned, by Denmark’s national theatre, as a play exclusively composed of writing from source texts – largely ledger books and court documents – held in the country’s historical witchcraft trials. Yet very quickly, Ravn realised that in drawing solely from these primary sources, ‘those accused will never get to speak,’ a story which, she argues, has already been told a thousand times. ‘At some point I was like, I can’t stand this,’ she says, ‘to only see the accused as shadows in these documents. I had to find another archive’. She turned then to a series of Danish and Norwegian folklore archives, whose texts were filled with spells and recipes handwritten by anonymous people. ‘There was almost a literary tradition there,’ she says, ‘specific rhythms and imagery that I wanted to engage with. I realised there are two different languages in these sources: the language of the law, and the language of folk magic’.
The Wax Child weaves dizzyingly between these two modes: the uncanny voice of the doll sitting alongside briefly spoken spells, and sudden, dispassionate violence as the community and state begin to close in around Krukow and her companions. More than a historical novel, The Wax Child is an interrogation of language, and what it makes visible or possible. ‘All language holds a view of the world,’ Ravn explains – in negotiating these different linguistic modes, she began to give a voice and subjectivity back to these women, whose language had long been erased from the official historical record. ‘I realised, for example, that 12 of these women sat together for a year in a cell. I became more and more intrigued by that place. How was it to sit there? How did they speak together? I [was interested in] the emotional experience, more than the spectacle of violence’.
In this way, Ravn’s novel taps into a genre of feminist rewriting of myths and history that has been gaining increasing popularity over the past two decades. The Wax Child is too fluid, too strange, to fully fit into this genre, but it contains the same suspicion of historiography and dominant narrative, and the same faith in literature and art to undo and remake our learned realities. ‘For me personally, a lot of this work – and it’s definitely feminist – begins with some sort of shame that I have about myself,’ Ravn says. ‘I try to use myself as a case study, stepping away and saying, ‘What is this shame about?’ And usually I will find that the shame is tied to some sort of societal expectation or story. Rewriting [these] stories is part of a renegotiation of how we understand each other. We have to constantly examine if they fit or if they’re true’.
It is a practice that has undergirded all of Ravn’s books, explicit rewriting or not. The Employees, the book that propelled her to international stardom following shortlisting on the International Booker Prize, concerns a group of workers – some human, some humanoid – tasked with taking care of alien objects on a spaceship. It contains as much traces of the horrific sterility of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ursula K Le Guin’s anti-capitalist science fiction works as it does the Lea Guldditte Hestelund’s exhibition Consumed Future Spewed Up as Present to which Ravn was directly responding. My Work, meanwhile, a piece of genre-defying autofiction, contains a densely populated bibliography of references, quotes, and allusions at the back, stretching from Anne Boyer’s poetry to Mary Shelley’s diaries.
‘I think I’m basically a very lonely person, but the times in my life where I feel less alone are without a doubt in the meeting of an incredible artwork’
All Ravn’s work is a negotiation with other work; an ongoing intertextual dialogue that reveals her love of reading as much as it does writing. ‘I’m very mistrustful of writers who don’t read,’ she says. ‘I don’t even really understand how they write. Brecht has this quote, it’s something about a Chinese poet writing a book that is only other people’s sentences. But [his] point is that you can’t really build anything alone. Maybe you can build a small hut, but if you want to build a huge palace, you will need other people’s work’.
Her draw to other people’s work began early: she was, she says, a voracious and indiscriminate reader as a child, reading everything from fairy tales to fantasy and horror novels and even teaching herself to write runes (‘such a nerdy child,’ she laughs). Her early reading experiences bled eventually into writing: her mother had a tape recorder and Ravn began recording herself retelling fairy tales, realising as she was doing so that she could make up her own endings. ‘I felt such immense pleasure,’ she says. ‘It was like the first time you do a cartwheel’.
She began writing longer stories and novels at the age of nine, showing them to her teachers with unabashed enthusiasm, and was accepted into the extremely prestigious and avant-garde writing school Forfatterskolen at the age of 21. Her first book, a collection of poetry entitled I Eat Myself Like Heather was published three years later; her output since has been prodigious, with three poetry collections and four novels published in the span of just over a decade.
‘I was thrown into a huge identity crisis, because I thought having a child and being an artist were mutually exclusive’
Her breakthrough internationally may have been The Employees, but in Denmark it was My Work, which came out two years after The Employees, following and documenting her complicated early experiences of motherhood. ‘I was thrown into a huge identity crisis, because I thought having a child and being an artist were mutually exclusive,’ Ravn says of that time. ‘That became a huge problem for me. I really needed to understand the experience of motherhood through art but even that need became confusing and shameful’. The resultant book – an attempt to negotiate this tension – unfolds across various forms: a young writer Anna’s diaries of early motherhood are discovered by the author, and collected alongside fragments of poetry, letters, and scripts. A masterpiece of autofiction, My Work is not only an exploration of social and cultural experiences of motherhood but also an inquiry into the function of literary forms and their capacity to hold such experiences.
Ravn was deeply inspired by Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, a book she read on her phone during night feeds when her first child was a few months old. She became fascinated by Lessing’s experimentation in structure, and the ways that a character’s inner conflict could find articulation in the fragmentation of the novel form. Motherhood, she came to realise, entirely resisted everything she had been taught about the novel: its linearity, its teleology, its adherence to narrative. ‘Each literary form holds a worldview,’ she explains. ‘And at that point, I was desperately seeking out what [motherhood] does to the novel. It’s difficult to put these experiences into language, because available forms cannot hold them. So we have to invent a new form for the novel. And that was why The Golden Notebook was so influential, not because I wanted to do the same thing, but because I realized it is possible. It is possible to engage with the history of the novel and pull it and turn it and see it in another way. That the novel could even do that was actually a surprise’.
‘You can’t really build anything alone. Maybe you can build a small hut, but if you want to build a huge palace, you will need other people’s work.’
Ultimately for Ravn, finding a new form for the novel – trying to put her experiences in writing and finding others who have put it in writing before, is a counter against loneliness, a way of positioning yourself within a larger, connected world. ‘I think I’m basically a very lonely person,’ she says, ‘but the times in my life where I feel less alone are without a doubt in the meeting of an incredible artwork, whether it’s a cave painting or contemporary novel. Then somebody has done something with the artistic action where I really come close to who they are, or to what they want to say’. This impetus towards connection is writ large across all her work, its intertextual reaching across time and space to connect with other artists and writers, and with the reader in turn.
‘Art is a way of engaging with the world and with time,’ Ravn says. ‘There’s a sense of people reading this in a long time, or being in conversation with someone who has died many years ago’. She pauses and smiles. ‘It’s the best time machine in the world’.
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