Wachskind | Olga Ravn

The perspective is out of the ordinary: a child moulded from beeswax, with human hair and fingernails is tracing the true story of unmarried noblewoman Christenze Kruckow in 17th-century Denmark. Rumours that she is possessed by the devil abound within the local community, where superstition, desire, lust and the sheer greed for power intertwine. Olga Ravn has crafted a witch novel that is at once tender, uncanny and scary, depicting the witch trials in Denmark in a poetic and refined literary style. Drawing on historical archive data and her imagination, Ravn has the waxen child disclose the whispering behind closed doors, the decisions made in private kitchens and the summoning rituals from the pulpit. Christenze Kruckow was sentenced to death in a historic witch hunt that laid bare a system in which denunciation, class privilege and mass panic ruled.

Olga Ravn’s novel oscillates between history and invocation in an engaging account of female alliances, male anxieties, bodies used as corpus delicti and language that works magic.

The German translation is due to be published mid-October 2025 by MÄRZ Verlag, translated by Alexander Sitzmann: https://www.maerzverlag.de/shop/buecher/literatur/wachskind/

Moderation: Tine Milz

Ensemble: Benny Claessens, Ann Göbel, Rosa Lembeck

Olga Ravn was born in 1986 in Copenhagen. She studied Literary Writing and has published several poetry books that have won her many prizes. She is a literary critic, editor and translator.