Join us on October 27 for a book talk with Danish bestselling author Harald Voetmann on his “erudite, grotesque, and absurdist trilogy”– Awake, Sublunar, and Visions and Temptations –moderated by Morten Høi Jensen. Voetmann’s eye-opening, visceral works cover mankind’s inhuman will to conquer nature through the eyes of various mystics, scientists, and innovators across centuries and landscapes in Europe: a bumbling Roman author and naturalist who perishes in Pompeii; pioneering Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe on the verge of a discovery; and a Benedictine monk on his deathbed.
In each novel, the genius of the protagonists clash with the inevitable prospects of their all-too-average demise, with their gazes held elsewhere, be it to the stars or into Hell. Voetmann’s works are a comic delight about a few of history’s greatest minds and the not-so-great human bodies they were housed in. Awake, Sublunar, and Visions and Temptations are all out now through New Directions Publishing.
“Reading Voetmann’s books makes me feel so alive. His voice is like no other, his hold on his material masterful.” — Olga Ravn, author of The Employees
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HARALD VOETMANN
Nominated for the Nordic Council Prize, the Danish author Harald Voetmann (b. 1978) has written novels, short stories, poetry and a monograph on the Roman poet Sulpicia. He also translates classical Latin literature, notably Petronius and Juvenal. Awake is the first in his series of three historical novels: the second centers on the sixteenth-century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, and the final book introduces the eleventh-century German mystic Othlo of St. Emmeram.
ABOUT THE MODERATOR
MORTEN HØI JENSEN
Morten Høi Jensen is a Danish-American writer and the author of The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain (2025) and A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen (2017). His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Review of Books, Commonweal, Liberties, the Washington Post, and elsewhere.
Author of The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain
Forthcoming from Yale University Press