Word for Word Exchange: Danish

Columbia University School of the Arts & Forfatterskolen, 2025

In May 2025, two School of the Arts graduate students were hosted by Forfatterskolen to participate in an eight-day collaborative residency. They visited the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and the small press publisher Basilisk, and began to work with their Danish counterparts on translations of each other’s writing in intensive workshops. This work was continued four months later, when the School of the Arts invited the students back to New York for workshops and lectures in creative writing. The culmination of this exchange was a reading of the final translations, followed by a panel discussion on the translation process, presented and hosted by Scandinavia House.

Columbia University School of the Arts Participants:

SOPHIA ACUÑA is a Chicana writer from Arizona. After working in neuroscience at UC San Diego, she started writing literary journalism pieces based in California and Mexico. Now, at Columbia University’s MFA program, she uses scientific and historical research in her fiction to curate new perspectives.

PATRICIO HERNÁNDEZ PALAZUELOS is a Mexican poet and translator based in New York City. His works explore the ideas of identity and urban life in an exophonic way. He translates from Spanish and Nahuatl (Mexico’s largest indigenous language) and also speaks French.

Forfatterskolen Participants:

CHRISTIAN FOBIAN (they/them), born 2000. Graduated from the Danish Academy of Creative Writing this summer. Their poems explore gender and group dynamics through magical realism. They are also an editor at the publishing house Basilisk.

KRISTA WINTHER graduated from The Danish Academy of Creative Writing this summer. Her texts often reflect upon intimacy, loneliness and being part of a community.

Institutional Partners:

FORFATTERSKOLEN is one of the leading literary writing schools in the Nordic countries. Founded in 1987 and approved by the Danish Ministry of Culture in 1996, the school offers a two-year, full-time program eligible for student grants. Each year, Forfatterskolen receives approximately 400 applications from across Scandinavia and admits six to eight promising writers. Courses are taught by some of Denmark’s most accomplished authors. Forfatterskolen develops each student’s artistic potential through workshops, seminars, one-to-one mentorship, and study-trips, emphasizing engagement with writing practice and literary reflection. Forfatterskolen is internationally unique for its influence on Danish literature and public discourse. For nearly four decades, it has been a vital part of the country’s literary ecosystem, educating leading innovators and promoting contemporary Danish language and literature through an experimental and exploratory approach.

THE DANISH ARTS FOUNDATION is Denmark’s largest arts foundation. It works to spread the arts to a wide audience all over Denmark, to promote Danish art internationally, and to pave the way for talented artists. Through more than 60 different funding programmes, the Foundation funds the production and promotion of both visual arts, film, literature, music, performing arts, architecture, crafts, and design—and all that transcends the borders of these art forms.

Workshop Instructors:

SHERILYN NICOLETTE HELLBERG is a writer and literary translator based in Copenhagen. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Frieze, among other places, and her translation of Jonas Eika’s After the Sun from the Danish was longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley and a BA in the same field from Columbia University.

KATRINE ØGAARD JENSEN is a poet and translator of Danish literature. She is the recipient of several fellowships and awards, including the National Translation Award in Poetry, the Kenyon Review’s Peter Taylor Fellowship, the Danish Arts Foundation’s Young Artistic Elite Fellowship, and Kjeld Elfelt’s Memorial Grant from the Danish Translators’ Association, and has been a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Ancient Algorithms, her collaborative poetry debut of mistranslations with contributors Sawako Nakayasu, Aditi Machado, Baba Badji, CAConrad, Paul Cunningham, and Ursula Andkjær Olsen, is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in September 2025. Jensen's translations include Third-Millennium Heart (Action Books, 2017), Outgoing Vessel (Action Books, 2021), and My Jewel Box (Action Books, 2022), all by Ursula Andkjær Olsen, as well as To The Most Beautiful by Mette Moestrup (co•im•press, 2024). She currently serves as Executive Director of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA).

PEJK MALINOVSKI is a poet, translator and radio producer. His latest book, Den store danske drømmebog (The Big Book of Danish Dreams) is a 233-page conceptual poem, based entirely on google searches. His radio documentaries have aired on radio stations around the world and won numerous awards. In 2012, he launched Passing Stranger, an audio walking tour of the East Village’s poetry history. He was also the co-creator and host of Thirdear, an online audio magazine. He has translated and published books by Anne Carson, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara and others for Forlaget Basilisk, a poet-run publishing house in Copenhagen.