Awards

• Short-listed for The Edvard P. Prize 2020

Overview

In the four stories that make up The Dolls, characters are plagued by unexplained illnesses and oblique, human-made disasters and environmental losses. A big sister descends into the family basement. Another sister refuses her younger brother. A third sister with memory loss is on the run, seeking shelter at Notpla. A fourth set of siblings travel to Hungary with their late mother in a coffin. They each have a different version of their mother's story. Drawing on the likes of August Strindberg, Franz Kafka, Andrej Kurkov, Knut Hamsun, T.S. Eliot, Bela Tarr, and Hieronymus Bosch, Scavenius's universe is chilling and excruciatingly seductive. In it, nothing can be said to be true anymore. After all, anything can be propaganda today.

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9781999992842

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Reviews

Ursula Scavenius is one of the most exciting Danish short story writers at work today. The Dolls, in Jennifer Russell's magnificent translation, is a literary page-turner: haunting, mesmerizing, and unforgettable in all its grotesque glory. - Katrine Ogaard Jensen

Author Information

URSULA SCAVENIUS is a writer based in Copenhagen. She is a graduate of the Danish Academy of Creative Writing and holds an MA in comparative literature and Italian from the University of Copenhagen. She debuted in 2015 with the short story collection Fjer [Feathers], which won the Bodil and Jorgen Munch-Christensen Prize and was nominated for the Montana Prize for Fiction. Her second book, The Dolls, was published in January 2020 and was shortlisted for the Edvard P. Prize that same year, as was Feathers in 2015. JENNIFER RUSSELL has published translations of Amalie Smith, Christel Wiinblad, and Peter-Clement Woetmann. She was the recipient of the 2019 Gulf Coast Prize for her translation of Ursula Scavenius's 'Birdland', and in 2020 she received an American-Scandinavian Foundation Award for her co-translation of Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild's All the Birds in the Sky.

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