Olga Ravn nominert til National Book Award for "Dei tilsette"

Olga Ravn er ein av ti nominerte til den amerikanske prestisjeprisen National Book Award. Ho er nominert i kategorien omsett skjønnlitteratur for romanen Dei tilsette.

Dei tilsette vart lansert i USA hausten 2020 til svært gode meldingar. Boka vart også kortlista til Bookerprisen. 

Utgåva på engelsk er gitt ut med tittelen The Employees, og Martin Aitken står bak omsettinga.

Les meir om nominasjonen her

Les meir om prisen og dei øvrige nominerte her

Dei tilsette er ein science fiction-idéroman om bioteknologi, kunstig intelligens, klimautfordringar og arbeidsvilkår, og om
kva det vil seia å vera menneskeleg. Boka er kompromisslaus i møte med eit av vår tids mest presserande spørsmål: Kva vil skje med
menneskeverdet i eit samfunn basert på effektivisering og stadig aukande vekst? Dei tilsette er omsett til norsk av  Inger Bråtveit.

Frå mottakinga iav den engelske utgåva:

The most striking aspect of this weird, beautiful, and occasionally disgusting novel is not, as its subtitle implies, its portrayal of working life on the spaceship... What The Employees captures best is humanity’s ambivalence about life itself, its sticky messes and unappealing functions, the goo that connects us to everything that crawls and mindlessly self-propagates, not to mention that obliterating payoff at the end of it all.

– Laura Miller, New York Review of Books

Everything I'm looking for in a novel. I was obsessed from the first page to the last. A strange, beautiful, deeply intelligent and provocative investigation into humanity. The Employees is an alarmingly brilliant work of art

– Max Porter

The voices of humans and humanoids are almost indistinguishable as they describe the disturbing dreams, imaginary smells, skin complaints and wild thoughts that seem to be provoked by these mysterious things, which hum, or ooze resin, or lay eggs… One humanoid co-worker refers to the parts of the Six-Thousand Ship where the humans are quartered as “a museum, a prison, a brothel … a nursery”. There may still be division in Ravn’s twenty-second century, but humans and humanoids alike answer to a distant, faceless corporation. If that’s a fate worth avoiding, there is still plenty of work for us all to do

– Richard Lea, TLS


The Employees is not only a disconcertingly quotidian space opera; it’s also an audacious satire of corporate language and the late-capitalist workplace, and a winningly abstracted investigation into what it means to be human

– Justine Jordan, The Guardian

The Employees is a strangely affecting work of speculative fiction which brings Vuillard’s war of the poor to the heavens. Irrespective of who wins the Booker International prize, they can be glad of the company they have kept on this ambitious and innovative shortlist

– Michael Cronin, The Irish Times

Stunning and poetic… All I want to do is quote the many highlighted bits that I keep returning to on a regular basis, lines of poetry that I keep repeating to myself

– Barbara Halla, Asymptote

Beautiful, sinister, gripping. A tantalising puzzle you can never quite solve. All the reviews say that the novel is, ultimately, about what it means to be human. What makes it exceptional, however, is the way it explores the richness and strangeness of being non-human

– Mark Haddon

Olga Ravn’s critique of life governed by work and the logic of productivity is long overdue. Through poetic insight and emotional eloquence, brilliantly delivered in Martin Aitken’s translation from Danish, she has created a frightening, astonishing literary experience

– Steph Glover, It’s Freezing in LA!