Join the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith for a virtual event with author Ursula Andkjær Olsen and translator Katrine Øgaard Jensen to discuss and celebrate the release of My Jewel Box, the last book in Olsen’s trilogy. They will be in conversation with poet Sohini Basak.

With My Jewel Box, prize-winning poet Ursula Andkjær Olsen completes her visionary trilogy—a “fairy tale of the universe” investigating grief, bodies, motherhood, and the physical and economic inequities of modern planetary life. Rendered into English by award-winning translator Katrine Øgaard Jensen, the trilogy begins with Third-Millennium Heart, a volume proposing a new understanding of the maternal body via orientation outwards to the cosmos at large. Olsen’s second book—a “mirror-poem” called Outgoing Vessel—re-thinks grief as a radical hardness, re-training lyric interiority through machine experimentations and technoscientific Google Translate mutations. With My Jewel Box, Olsen mounts a cosmically human (and non-human) re-approach to a grief-stricken earth, a place of all times entangled.

Ursula Andkjær Olsen 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 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. Her translation of Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s Outgoing Vessel 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 Literary Translation from 2019-2020.

Moderator Sohini Basak’s first poetry collection We Live in the Newness of Small Differences was awarded the inaugural International Beverly Manuscript Prize and published in 2018. In 2017, she received a Toto Funds the Arts award. She studied literature and creative writing at the universities of Delhi, Warwick, and East Anglia, where she was awarded the 2015 Malcolm Bradbury Continuation Grant for Poetry. She works as an editor and is joining us from her hometown Barrackpore in India.

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