International Symposium

Born in 1963 in Greenland, Naja Marie Aidt is a Danish-language poet, playwright, screenwriter, children’s book author, and novelist of around 30 published works.
Aidt published her first poetry collection While I’m Still Young in 1991.

Her short story collection Baboon won the Danish Critics’ Prize and the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize in 2008, the most prestigious literary award in the Nordic region.
The book was later translated into English and received the 2015 PEN Translation Prize in the United States.
Aidt’s debut novel Rock, Paper, Scissors was published in 2012.
In 2017, she published When Death Takes Something From You, Give It Back—Carl’s Book, a moving account of the year following her son’s death.
The book was a finalist for both the 2019 US National Book Award and the Kirkus Review Prize.

Her 2024 collection Exercises in Darkness tells stories of the painful yet ordinary realities filling women’s lives—violence, assault, aging, resistance—and of finding one’s truth, voice, and path toward healing despite them.
Regarded as one of Scandinavia’s most important contemporary writers, her works have been translated into 19 languages.

Aidt has received Denmark’s Lifetime Achievement Award from the Danish Arts Foundation, the Beatrice Prize, the Danish Academy’s Grand Prize (the country’s highest literary honor), and in 2022, the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize, often referred to as the “little Nobel Prize.”

photo copyright © Mikkel Tjellesen