Another author I’m looking forward to reading this year is Naja Marie Aidt. I bought a couple of her books when I was I the Netherlands last year, and although she is very well known within the Netherlands, as I’m sure you’ve already realized, outside of the Netherlands not so much.
She was raised partly in Greenland and partly in Copenhagen, and this duality can be seen not only in her life, but in her writing as well. Although she favors a minimalist writing style, her novels also show depth and profundity as they portray characters transitioning from one stage to another in their lives, be they men or women.
She has won the Danish Fund for the Endowment of the Arts (1994), the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize in 2008, and also the Danish Critics Prize for Literature in 2007. These second two were for her collection of short stories titled “Baboon”, which I wrote about previously. The next work I will read by her is her first novel “Rock, Paper, Scissors”, about the death of a criminal father and the legacy he leaves behind for his children to discover.
As we are appreciating this year, representation matters, and reading literature by women matters. I can’t express how much reading, and reading women’s lit, has changed my life and helped me to appreciate who I am as a person and especially who I am as a woman. Making a reading list full of women authors gets me excited about what is to come, something which can be particularly difficult these days.