Olsen, Ursula Andkjær

Olsen, Ursula Andkjær (c) privat

Ursula Andkjær Olsen, born in Copenhagen in 1970, is one of Denmark’s best-known poets. Since her literary debut in 2000, she has published 12 volumes of poetry as well as dramatic texts and opera libretti, and her first novel was published in 2017. Olsen has received numerous grants and prizes for her work. Since 2018, she has been a member of the Danish Academy, and since August 2019, she has been the director of the Forfatterskolen, the Danish Academy for Creative Writing in Copenhagen. Her most recent volume of poetry, “Mit smykkeskrin” (Gyldendal 2020), was nominated for the Nordic Council Prize for Literature; excerpts from it appeared in the volume “ist das mein Kind, ist das meine Mutter” (translated by Clara Sondermann, hochroth Verlag) in 2022.

Festival Content

WRITING MOTHERHOOD

„…grammatickt mamal aus…“

Kleines Parkett 8/6€ | Tickets

 

“How much poetic furor has been suffocated by the stench of diapers, quite literally in the muck, without even making it to the trash?” asks poet Dagmara Kraus in her polemic essay on poetry and motherhood. Other poets writing about motherhood found collectives, understandably called “CARE RAGE.”

Ursula Andkjær Olsen, Tjawangwa Dema, Athena Farrokhzad, Joanna Mueller, and Alice Notley write about motherhood, mother figures, pregnancy and childbirth, miscarriage, and abortion. In their poems, they seek a language to describe existential questions of motherhood and its archetypes.

 

Olsen, Ursula Andkjær • Dema, Tjawangwa • Farrokhzad, Athena • Mueller, Joanna • Notley, Alice