Happy Book Birthday to The Employees by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken 🎉

The Spring 2022 season has officially arrived! Today, we’re kicking off the new season with the release of The Employees by Olga Ravn, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken. A finalist for the 2021 International Booker Prize and currently longlisted for the 2022 Dublin Literary Award novel , The Employees reshuffles a sci-fi voyage into a riotously original existential nightmare. Read on to learn all about this critically acclaimed novel!

Happy Book Birthday to The Employees by Danish literary superstar Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken! The latest titles in our Literature in Translation Series, Ravn’s acclaimed novel has been garnering a lot of buzz ahead of its Canadian release, already having appeared on All Lit Up’s Off/Kilter Spring 2022 Most Anticipated Reads preview and Open Book’s February Excerpt series. Funny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members alike complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos.

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. The 2021 International Booker Prize Judges call it “loving and cold, funny and deliberately prosaic,” they add, “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.”

Praise for The Employees:

Please join us again in wishing a very Happy Book Birthday to The Employees by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken. Available now from our online shop or from your local independent bookstore. Also available on all eBook and Audiobook platforms. Happy reading!