VIRTUAL - Ursula Andkjær Olsen and translator Katrine Jensen

This event will take place on Zoom Webinar. Click here to register. 

Ursula Andkjær Olsen and translator Katrine Jensen will be in conversation with Joseph Schreiber. 

Third-Millennium Heart explores the confounding nature of power and desire, the problem of asserting a feminist alternative without recapitulating patriarchal power structures: “The goal is to weaken every trace of odor. It will cost me my victory scent.” Yet Olsen’s ambivalence entails an embryonic potential: uncoupled from all normative arrivals, her syntax sprouts with mutant possibility, one nimbly conveyed by translator Jensen’s flexible touch. From the darkness of this “comajubilation,” in a stutter-step of declarations and retractions, Third-Millennium Heart is a work of radical re-conjuration: “Together we will beat/in the great DELTA.”

With its mutant orbs of grief and technoscientific phenomena, Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s Outgoing Vessel is the electrifying sequel to Katrine Øgaard Jensen’s award-winning translation of Third-Millennium Heart. The book-length mirror poem titled Udgående Fartøj (Outgoing Vessel) received the Danish Critics Prize for Literature in 2015. Now, for the first time in English, a radically new and resilient voice emerges — an Outgoing Vessel — from an all-consuming darkness: “INSIDE ME THERE IS A NONDEGRADABLE ORB / MY OWN PLANET”.

Nominated for the 2021 Nordic Council Literature Prize, My Jewel Box (Mit smykkeskrin) marks the final installment of Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s visionary trilogy, a “fairy tale of the universe” investigating grief, bodies, motherhood, and the physical and economic inequalities of modern planetary life. Rendered into diamond-sharp English by award-winning translator Katrine Øgaard Jensen, My Jewel Box mounts a cosmically human (and non-human) re-approach to a grief-stricken earth, a place of all times entangled.

Ursula Andkjær Olsen (b. 1970) made her literary debut in 2000 and has since published nine collections of poetry and one novel, in addition to several dramatic texts and libretti for operas such as Danish composer Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s Sol går op, sol går ned, and composer Peter Bruun’s Miki Alone, which was awarded the Nordic Council Music Prize in 2008. Olsen has received numerous awards for her work, including the Danish Arts Foundation’s Award of Distinction in 2017, the 2012 Montanaprisen award for Det 3. årtusindes hjerte (Third-Millennium Heart, Broken Dimanche Press/Action Books 2017), and the 2015 Danish Critics Prize for Literature for Udgående fartøj (Outgoing Vessel, Action Books 2021). Since 2019, Olsen has served as head of The Danish Academy of Creative Writing. Her latest poetry collection, Mit Smykkeskrin (My Jewel Box, Action Books 2022), was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2021.

Katrine Øgaard Jensen (b. 1988) is a poet, writer, and translator from the Danish. She is a recipient of several fellowships and awards, including the Danish Arts Foundation’s Young Artistic Elite Fellowship in 2020 as well as the 2018 National Translation Award in Poetry for her translation of Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s Third-Millennium Heart (Broken Dimanche Press/Action Books 2017). Her translation of Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s Outgoing Vessel (Action Books 2021) was shortlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation in 2022. She teaches creative writing and literary translation at Columbia University, where she served as Acting Director of LTAC (Literary Translation at Columbia) from 2019-2020.

Joseph Schreiber is a writer and editor based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. His essays and poems have been published in a variety of online journals and print anthologies. He is a former nonfiction editor at 3:AM Magazine and maintains the literary site roughghosts.