I think the committee simply jumbled the papers together in a messy pile and put them in a file. What is the significance of this and do you expect the reader to re-read it in a different order?

The order of the ‘statements’ is jumbled, according to the numbering. So, I made the characters loose contact with Earth, literally. I also needed personally to write about a feeling of having lost your relationship to land. And when I say resources, I mean both land and bodies. I wanted to examine how we relate to the soil, the weather, the atmosphere, and I wanted to write about this obsession with resources. By making Earth distant I could examine man’s relationship to it in a new way.

I wanted a space that was completely confined, with no exit, and I also wanted to see what would happen if human beings were taken out of their ecology, away from Earth. I worked closely together with the artist Lea Guldditte Hestelund, while writing the book, and she suggested a space somewhere between a spaceship and an Alexander Wang flagship store, which was very inspiring to me. Why do you choose the setting of a spaceship for your novel?

It’s a novel about trying to stay hard, but gradually being exposed to yourself as the softest material. How would you sum up The Employees in one sentence? It has been the most wonderful, delightful surprise. Hi Olga, what has it been like to be longlisted?

The employees olga ravn