The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken

From the internationally celebrated author of The Employees and My Work comes an extraordinary, haunting tale of witchcraft and persecution.

In seventeenth-century Denmark, unmarried noblewoman Christenze Kruckow and several other women are accused of witchcraft. They are rumoured to be possessed by the Devil, who comes to them in the form of a tall, headless man and gives them dark powers. It is said they perform unchristian acts and can steal people’s happiness, cause pestilence, illness, or even death. And once the rumour of witchcraft takes hold, they are all in danger of the stake.

Narrated by a wax doll created by Christenze one dark night in 1620, The Wax Child is an unsettling, dizzying horror story about brutality and power, nature and witchcraft, set in the fragile communities of pre-modern Europe.

Deeply researched and steeped in visceral, atmospheric detail, The Wax Child is based on a series of infamous witchcraft trials that took place in Northern Jutland. Full of lush, vivid storytelling and alarmingly rich imagination, Olga Ravn weaves in quotes from original sources, such as letters, court documents, magic spells, and Scandinavian grimoires.

Praise for The Wax Child

“Olga Ravn is a master and an alchemist. There’s nobody else doing quite what she does.” —Samantha Harvey, Booker Prize–winning author of Orbital

“The Wax Child book is a constantly expanding cosmos of the possibilities of the strange, a phenomenon unto itself. Ravn’s near peerless gift for storying disordered nature—and what happens when women’s lives are made spectacular—is rendered with such subtlety and compact force that voicings of wax, fingernails, tooth, and ink struck me over and over as real as air. Aitkin’s translation weaves the tapestry of Ravn’s imagination into English as fiery, restlessly beautiful, and uncannily wise.” —Canisia Lubrin, multiple award–winning author of Code Noir

“Ravn’s disturbingly inventive horror novel is a book of dark magic itself, a reimagining of a historical witch trial that questions the nature of witchcraft, sisterhood, and the viciousness of power.” —Paola Ferrante, Governor General’s Literary Award–shortlisted author of Her Body Among Animals

“A highly inventive novel that subverts the historical fiction genre. Part grimoire, part poem, The Wax Child casts an irresistible spell upon the reader. Hypnotic and tense, mysterious and haunting, Ravn has written what is sure to become a classic in occult fiction.” —Liz Worth, author of Inside Every Dream, a Raging Sea

“Addictive and unsettling.” —Claire-Louise Bennett

“I gulped The Wax Child down and dreamed wild dreams about it. Just brilliant.” —Max Porter

“Dark and strange and beautiful and completely gripping.” —Mark Haddon

2026 International Booker Prize Jury Citation

“Set during the witch trials of 17th-century Denmark, this unforgettable novel by Olga Ravn is compulsively readable yet anything but biddable–shadowy lives are revealed in shadowy prose, largely from the perspective of an object, a wax doll belonging to a group of women who exploit magic as a means of survival. Martin Aitken has leant his pitch-perfect ear to the period language and poetry of the Danish original. Every word in The Wax Child feels spontaneous, every scene alive, as if Ravn and Aitken had lived and breathed its mysterious atmospheres in order to deliver them to us. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that this haunting, gripping, and singular historical novel cast a spell on us.”

Press Coverage

“An intensely poetic portrait of everyday sorcery and female solidarity… The Wax Child is richly evocative, beautiful, creepy, and visceral.” —Aida Edemariam, Guardian

“A magnificent book. A true masterpiece of both substance and style.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“This devilishly subversive feminist anthem is one of a kind.” —Publishers Weekly

“Ravn’s prose is microscopically alive with historical detail, exquisitely translated by Martin Aitken.” —Catherine Taylor, Financial Times

“In The Wax Child, novelist and poet Olga Ravn turns 17th-century terrifying Danish women’s history into a sublime novel of struggle and resilience.” —Shelf Awareness

“An utterly strange, mesmeric, eerie, short masterpiece about witchcraft. Whatever it is we are looking for when we read, the thing in our hands has it—that strange, in this case, dark magic.” —The Bookseller

The Most Anticipated Books Of Fall 2025 —Bustle

Excerpted: The Wax Child —All Lit Up

“Fans of Olga Ravn’s beautiful and weird stories no doubt have this one on their list already, and it very much lives up to the hype. The Wax Child is an eerie, unsettling book.” —James Folta, Lit Hub

Read an Excerpt from The Wax Child by Olga Ravn (Translated by Martin Aitkin) —Open Book

“The Wax Child is one to remember and return to, a story of power and who wields it, a story of women and how they stick together—and fall apart.” —Madeline Schultz, Chicago Review of Books

“The story is told by a doll carved from beeswax… a fascinating and totally inhuman consciousness, one of many startling feats in this book.” —Emma Alpern, New York Magazine

“Ravn’s prose is striking, richly marbled with quotation and detail pulled from primary sources. The texture of this true language is perfect alongside Ravn’s keen ear for viscera: blood sucked from a cut finger, pens scratching and leaking, teeth sliding through the narrator’s wax body.”—Emily Temple, LitHub

“Ravn creates a visceral atmosphere using rich, tactile details… The Wax Child asks to be read in a single, rapturous sitting in which its dark, fast-paced and disturbing narrative pulls the reader immediately into otherworldly environs.” —Anandi Mishra, ArtReview

“Ravn’s narrative gathers pace with unflinching and claustrophobic swiftness.” —Kat Trigarsky, Washington Post

“Olga Ravn’s prose is at once concise and freewheeling, and bristles with astonishing metaphors… An outstanding novel.” —Ella Walker, Irish Times

“Ravn’s fourth novel is gorgeously mercurial: fragmented, slippery, unresolved (a quality masterfully captured by Martin Aitken’s translation).”—Beejay Silcox, Times Literary Supplement

“Ravn rejects the lurid spectacle that witch hunts and trials once provided. Instead, she directs the reader’s attention to the social rewards that witchcraft, as practiced in this novel, offers: namely, friendships with other women and the chance to enact (if not achieve) rebellion against the men and social forces that have circumscribed their lives.” —Irene Katz Connelly, Los Angeles Review of Books

“It’s primitive poetry that gives The Wax Child its claustrophobia, intensified by drone-like repetitions. But the claustrophobia is an index of something else too: the very intimacy of adversaries, accusers and accused, isolated on a cold and dank peninsula… In the end we’re left with the mystery of sympathy: between friends, between life and non-life, between objects.” —Ange Mlinko, London Review of Books