January 2022, Scandinavia House New York

Participated in the virtual literary panel The Familiar & the Absurd: Literature from Copenhagen at Scandinavia House New York, alongside Ida Marie Hede, Steven Zultanski and Tom Conaghan.

”The authors will discuss their newly translated books each exploring themes of the body and intimacy from unique sci-fi perspectives.”

2021

Interviewed by Rosie Ellison-Balaam for Lolli Editions, discussing The Dolls, complicity, political and social inaction, and the relationship between contemporary reality and the surreal. In the conversation, I discuss the book's central question of how we respond to the suffering of others, and how closing our eyes to what happens around us can itself become a form of complicity.

Ursula Scavenius in Conversation with Rosie Ellison-Balaam
Lolli Editions

https://www.lollieditions.com/lolli-in.../ursula-scavenius

2022

I continue the collaboration with director Mille Maria Dalsgaard and Sydhavn Teater with a new theatre project based on Birdland (Fugleland), the final story in Feather. The project developed through a shared writing process, translating the literary work into visual and physical theatre.

The project is supported by an arts grant.

The Dolls in the great Asymptote Journal:

Selected as the Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month in the UK for The Dolls, published by Lolli Editions and translated by Jennifer Russell:

To mark the publication of Ursula Scavenius’s The Dolls, translated from the Danish by Jennifer Russell and released today, Rosie Ellison-Balaam spoke to Scavenius about how she came to write her compulsive and vigorously inventive stories that search deep into Europe’s haunted past, present and future. She speaks about how she found the language to reflect current crises, from the local effects of climate change to the ominous situations so many displaced families are finding themselves in every day. But hers is also a fiction that cracks open all the windows and draws aside the blinds so that the light can flood in – and so that we might better see. Welcome to The Dolls.

https://www.lollieditions.com/lolli-in-conversation/ursula-scavenius

October 2021

Reviewed in The Irish Times in Declan O'Driscoll's Translated Fiction: A Round-up of the Best New Books, alongside works by Andreas-Salomé, László Krasznahorkai, Saadat Hasan Manto, Zineb Sedira and Mercè Rodoreda. The review described The Dolls, translated by Jennifer Russell, as a collection of “artful, singular stories” marked by rigorous inventiveness of language and technique, and noted its distinctive, oblique engagement with the calamities of our time.

Read the review in The Irish Times

2021

Selected as an Editor's Pick on BBC Radio 4's Open Book for The Dolls, with Neil Griffiths discussing the book in the programme. Griffiths described Scavenius as a writer of “extremely unusual imaginative powers” and called The Dolls“one of the most extraordinary pieces of writing I've ever read.”

Listen to the BBC Radio 4 programme

Review af The Dolls inTranslating women!

Read the whole review here:

https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/

2022

“Compartment”, a story from The Dolls, published in Granta’s online edition, translated by Jennifer Russell. The story explores exile, the loss of a parent and the inherited memories of displacement, following siblings travelling by train to Hungary to bury their mother.

https://granta.com/compartment/

Other selected reader-reviews

The Dolls - among other New books in the autumn in London 2021!

November 2021

Published The Dolls by Ursula Scavenius, translated by Jennifer Russell, with Lolli Editions (UK).

The collection brings together four stories set in a world that is at once strange and recognisably familiar, marked by isolation, ruin, prejudice, misinformation and environmental loss. The four stories follow characters confronted with unexplained illnesses, fractured families, displacement and human-made disasters, while different versions of reality and memory continually collide.

The collection draws on literary and artistic influences including August Strindberg, Franz Kafka, Andrey Kurkov, Knut Hamsun, T. S. Eliot, Béla Tarr and Hieronymus Bosch.

Publication date: 21 October 2021!

2021

Literary meeting: Cyprus–Denmark, organised by the Greek Institute in Copenhagen and the Danish Association of Fiction Writers, with Cypriot writers Constantia Soteriou and Maria A. Ioannou, Danish writer Adda Djørup, and Ursula Scavenius.

Supported by the Danish Arts Foundation.

2021

Featured in Exacting Clam, Issue No. 2, with a review of The Dolls praising Scavenius's distinctive approach to contemporary storytelling and describing the collection as a response to violence, repression and the structures underlying privilege.

The review also highlights Jennifer Russell's translation, praising its sensitivity to the starkness of the original and its ability to reveal the disturbing images and themes beneath the surface of Scavenius's prose.

Read the full review in Exacting Clam

July 2021

Reading and conversation on writing with Proust in mind at a literary event held during the Proust Festival at Literature House Copenhagen, marking the occasion of Marcel Proust's 150th birthday.

Prizewinning
June 2021

My story Luna Seconda, from my debut collection Feather (Fjer – tre fortællinger, Basilisk, 2015), was adapted for the stage by Sydhavn Teater and directed by Mille Maria Dalsgaard. The production won the Reumert Award for Digital Performance 2021.

The production brought the literary text directly into the theatrical space, transforming its surreal and dystopian vision of a flooded world, climate catastrophe and human vulnerability into an experimental digital performance.

Jury citation:
“With insatiable curiosity, the cameras caressed two moons, two bodies and a flooded world full of decaying birds. Like a fever dream, the theatre streaming came so close to the global nightmare of the climate crisis that close-ups of the dubious truth about the couple and their dream child became unsettling waves of impending catastrophe. Beautiful and disgusting – and madly live.”

The production was dedicated to my father, who died two months before the award. He was, in spirit, a heretical adventurer who shared my fascination with possible realities and my concern with environmental destruction, political xenophobia and falsehood.

Read the full Reumert jury citation

Spring 2021

Sydhavn Teater staged Luna Seconda, based on my story of the same name from Feather (Fjer – tre fortællinger, Basilisk, 2015), directed by Mille Maria Dalsgaard.

The production transformed the literary text into an experimental digital theatre work, combining literature, live performance and technology to explore climate catastrophe, bodily vulnerability and a world on the brink of collapse.

In Information, critic Søren Meisner describes the production and text as an “eminent flood drama” and praises its “sensory shocks”, calling Dalsgaard's adaptation a powerful and immersive transformation of the story into live digital theatre.

Read the review in Information: https://www.information.dk/kultur/anmeldelse/2021/03/omsider-lykkes-teaterstreaming-eminent-oversvoemmelsesdrama-fostre-uden-fremtid

Luna Seconda — Credits

Writer: Ursula Scavenius
Cast: Iza Mortag Freund, Siff Vintersol, Maria Carmen Lindegaard
Director & Dramaturgical Adaptation: Mille Maria Dalsgaard
Cinematographer & Performer: Malik Grosos
Immersive Design: Jakob La Cour
Live Operator & Stage Manager: Jacob Weitze Mylund
Set Design: Carl Johan Sennels
Set & Costume Design: Cæcilie Tørnsø
Composer & Lighting Design: Brian Larsen
Front of House & Backstage: Nicole Johansen
Press: Karen Toftegaard APS
Producer: Marie Egetoft
Process Photography: Malik Grosos
Production Photography: Søren Meisner

Luna Seconda / Feather: Basilisk

Supported by:
The Beckett Foundation, Kgs. Enghave Local Committee, Danish Actors' Association, Copenhagen Municipality's Performing Arts Committee, and the Lemvigh-Müller Foundation.

Spring 2021

Lolli Editions acquired the English-language rights to my second book, The Dolls, marking an important turning point in my writing career and the beginning of the book's international life! The London-based independent publisher included the book in its 2021 catalogue, announcing its publication in Jennifer Russell's translation on 21 October 2021.

Lolli Editions described The Dolls as “strange, macabre, and unsettling” and presented it as the work of a prize-winning Danish writer of absurdist fiction. The four stories follow characters confronted with unexplained illnesses, environmental loss, fractured families, displacement and competing versions of reality, in a world where “nothing can be said to be true anymore”.

The book was translated by Jennifer Russell, winner of the Gulf Coast Magazine Prize in Translation 2019 for her translation of Birdland (Fugleland) by Ursula Scavenius.

Lolli Editions — 2021 Catalogue

October 2020

Talk at BLOXHUB on “Future Scenarios for Post-Covid Cities”, discussing technology, changing work-life patterns, crisis logic, dystopian futures and the relationship between human agency and technological influence, as part of BLOXHUB's City Life in Times of and After Covid-19 series.

Watch the talk

October 2020

Participated in a literary session at the Danish Academy, sharing literature, texts and writing experience with fellow writers.

Review of The Dolls in Litteraturmagasinet Standart, describing the collection as a powerful and deeply relevant portrait of human folly and as “beautifully written discomfort”. The review highlights Scavenius's evocation of twentieth- and twenty-first-century catastrophes and the uncanny familiarity of the nightmares created by her prose.

September 2020

Nominated for the Edvard P. Prize for The Dolls (Dukkerne). The nomination was highlighted by Litteratursiden as part of its presentation of ten talented new Danish writers nominated for the prize, including a recorded reading from the book.

Copenhagen Literary Agency also featured The Dolls, describing the collection as “a quiet and powerful attack on our sense of security and complacency” and its tendency to prevent us from questioning what it means to be human.

August 2020

Invited author at the literary seminar Alverdens Fremtider (“Futures of the World”) at Rødding Højskole, 28–30 August 2020. Participated in a literary conversation with critic and researcher Mikkel Krause Frantzen on Can We Believe in the Future?, discussing The Dolls alongside his book En fremtid uden fremtid: Dystopi og utopi (A Future Without a Future: Dystopia and Utopia).

The Dolls was also selected for a guided group reading during the seminar, alongside Peter Adolphsen's Små historier 3.

April 2020

I was awarded the Danish Arts Foundation's prestigious three-year Working Grant for literature, supporting my writing from 2020 to 2023.

The Literature Committee's citation described my work as drawing the reader into the mysterious, distorted and uncanny, while allowing these unfamiliar worlds to point back towards ourselves and our shared reality:

“If you are interested in the mysterious, the skewed, the distorted or the strange, you also know that the uncanny and the compelling are found not only there, but also — and perhaps much more — in what you nevertheless recognise: the parts that point back to you and your fellow human beings.”

April 2020

Copenhagen Literary Agency announced that The Dolls (Dukkerne) would be published in Swedish by Modernista, following the Swedish publication of my debut collection Feather (Fjer), translated by Henrik Petersen.

The Swedish edition of The Dolls marked a continuation of my collaboration with Modernista and the international publication of my work.

February 2020

Selected for the Danish Arts Foundation's Books from Denmark spring programme, presenting The Dolls (Dukkerne) among selected Danish works of literary fiction.

Winter, 2019

Jennifer Russell's translation of Birdland, from my debut collection Feather (Fjer, Basilisk, 2015), won the Gulf Coast Magazine Prize in Translation 2019. An excerpt from the story was subsequently published in Gulf Coast Magazine.

Read *Birdland* in Gulf Coast Magazine:

http://gulfcoastmag.org/contests/the-2018-gulf-coast-prize-in-translation/

Oplæsning Montana nominering

Samtale på Bogforum

New book publication from Routledge, 2024, which explores, among other things, my work The Dolls – and more broadly 'the uncanny and new worlds' in Danish literature.

"The focus will be on speculative fiction by Danish authors Ursula Scavenius, Jonas Eika, and Olga Ravn."

"In the last decade, a great many books have been published in Denmark that can be classified as speculative fiction, rendering darkish visions of possible futures where human superiority is questioned. In these books, people no longer live under the conditions of the human but of the posthuman. The aim of this chapter is to examine this trend that, akin to recent movements in philosophy going under the name of speculative realism, renegotiates the boundaries between human and nonhuman, familiar and unfamiliar, past and future. By making use of the concept of the uncanny, on the one hand, and the concept of speculation, on the other, the chapter argues for speculative literary practices as a means of opening up for other realities and for possible futures that might unfold on premises we still do not know."The focus will be on speculative fiction by Danish authors Ursula Scavenius, Jonas Eika, and Olga Ravn."

#nybog #danskfiktions #spekulativfiktion #RoutledgeIndia #lollieditions

Olga RavnJonas EikaUrsulaScavenius

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/.../welcome-uncanny-valley...

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