Read and discuss literature with our Nordic Book Club Online! Nordic Book Club meets monthly via Zoom to discuss contemporary literature in translation. On March 10, 2026, in coordination with our film festival West Nordic Film Days, we’ll be discussing Faroese author and Nordic Council Literature Prize nominee Kim Simonsen’s poetry collection What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium, in translation by Randi Ward.
The rhetorical title of this collection posits the crisis that is underway. Simonsen asks: as a species among species, all composed of the matter of the universe, how has our compulsion to classify everything hierarchically estranged us from ourselves, each other, and Earth’s ecosystems? Simonsen challenges our anthropocentric pursuit of knowledge, exploring humankind’s relationship with itself as an element of the natural world. follows the struggles of its narrator as he reckons with intensifying estrangement from his fellow organisms, gradually turning to the greater kinship of matter to find continuity, connection, and solace.
Nordic Council Literature Prize nominee Kim Simonsen introduces a new poetics to Faroese literature rooted in natural history, philosophy, and the materiality of all things in a collection hailed as “luminous and arresting, like the islands themselves” (Martin Aitken). The translation by Randi Ward was a winner of the ASF Nadia Christensen Translation Prize.
What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium is available in paperback and e-book from Deep Vellum and from Bookshop.org and other retailers.