Originally from Greenland, Naja Marie Aidt is a Danish poet and author with nearly thirty works in various genres—mostly poetry—to her name. She is also a playwright and screenwriter and has published children’s books and translated fiction and poetry from Swedish and Norwegian. Read More She has received numerous honors, including the Danish Critics Choice Award, the Danish Art Foundation’s Award for Lifelong Service, and the Nordic nations’ most prestigious literary prize, the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize, in 2008 for Baboon. In 2015 Denise Newman won the PEN Award for her translation of Baboon. Aidt’s work has been translated into nineteen languages. When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back is a shattering elegy about the death of her twenty-five-year-old son, Carl. It was shortlisted for the Kirkus Review Awards for Nonfiction and longlisted for the National Book Awards for Translated Literature. In 2022 she won the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize.

In 2008, Aidt won the prestigious Nordic Council Literature Prize for her short story collection Bavian. The collection was published as Baboon in the US (Two Lines Press, 2014, translated by American poet Denise Newman), where it was recently awarded the 2015 PEN Translation Prize. Her novel Rock, Paper, Scissors was published in August 2015 by Open Letter Press in a translation by American author and literary critic Kyle Semmel. Aidt lives in Brooklyn, New York.