The Wax Child (Voksbarnet)
Translated into English by Martin Aitken
It was a black night in the year 1620 when Christenze Krukow made the wax child, when she melted down beeswax and set it in the image of a small human. For days, she carried it tucked beneath her arm, shaping it with the warmth of her flesh, giving it life. She fashioned for it eyes and ears that cannot open, and yet – it watches and listens.
It looks on as Christenze is haunted by rumour, it hears what the people whisper. It sees how, in the candlelight, she gazes with love at her friends, and hears the things they say in the shadows. It knows pine forest, misty fjord and the crackle of the burning pyre. It observes the violence in men’s eyes and the cruelty of their laws. In time, it begins to understand that once a suspicion of witchcraft has taken hold, it can prove impossible to shake…
Based on an infamous seventeenth century Danish witch trial, The Wax Child is the extraordinary new novel from Olga Ravn, one of the most acclaimed and original writers at work today: a mesmerising, frightening vision of a time when witches and magic were as real to the human mind as soil and seawater.
Praise for THE WAX CHILD:
“In a single sentence The Wax Child moves from dark to light to violent to tender. There's nobody else doing quite what Olga Ravn does. She's a master and an alchemist.”
– Samantha Harvey
“Dark and strange and beautiful and completely gripping”
– Mark Haddon
“Addictive and unsettling”
– Claire-Louise Bennett
“The Wax Child has emerged from an imagination that is wild, visionary, and absolutely original. It is beautiful, eerie, sublime, and, like a fingerprint or a snowflake, only one of its kind. Olga Ravn is a roof-raisingly brilliant writer.”
– Neel Mukherjee
“Olga Ravn descends into a dark historical world of fear and danger, nightmarish fantasy, sordid suffering and blood. Magic is portrayed as a real power not only to be feared, but aspired to by an underclass of disadvantaged yet defiant women”
– Malcolm Gaskill, author of The Ruin of All Witches
“An instant classic that feels passed down from centuries ago and yet utterly unique, fresh, and modern. Another stunning, surreal journey from an author who seems to never disappoint”
– Jeff VanderMeer
“A spellbinding tale of loss and longing. A magnificent book. A true masterpiece of both substance and style.”
– Kirkus
“Olga Ravn tugs skillfully at the treads of reality, subtly distorting events to reveal hidden, dislocated truths”
– The New York Times
“I wish I could bottle the experience of reading this utterly strange, mesmeric, eerie, short masterpiece about witchcraft, whose revelatory language and sheer inventiveness put me in mind of Anne Carson (…) Avid readers will know that quickening of the heartbeat, the hitched breath, that reader’s brand of goosebumps elicited by the realisation that whatever we read, the thing in our hands has it – that strange, in this case dark, magic”
– The Bookseller, fiction book of the Month highlight November 2025
“The author of International Booker Prize shortlisted The Employees and My Work delivers another stylistic swerve in The Wax Child, a wonderfully witchy tale, based on a real-life 17th century witch trial in Denmark. Sinister magic and folk-horror combine into a novel that is as creepingly atmospheric as it is formally impressive.”
– Foyles, Best Translated Fiction of 2025
“With The Wax Child, Olga Ravn has written her best book to date. (...) The language is like wax in Olga Ravn's hands, and there is never any doubt that this genre-renewing historical novel is also the work of a poet. (...) Along the way, Olga Ravn shows herself to be both a wonderful bard and a deeply original storyteller with a very special ability to bring out the beauty that hides somewhere between the world of things and the world of poetry”
- Kristeligt Dagblad
“Olga Ravn's new novel is a powerful, poetry-infused piece of writing, a precisely written true crime about witch trials in 17th century Aalborg. (...) It is an impressive endeavour of stylishness and textuality in its coverage of a rather concentrated and precise subject”
- Berlingske
“Kapow for a staging! You feel the city's hateful atmosphere as strongly as you sense the stench of cabbage and herring. (... ) Olga Ravn writes in an other-worldly manner, beautifully and poetically about folk magic (…) Voksbarnet is both a beautiful and poetic reading experience.”
- Weekendavisen
