What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium

Auteur

Kim Simonsen is a Faroese writer. He is the author of seven books, as well as numerous essays and academic articles. In 2014, Simonsen won the Faroese National Award for his poetry collection What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium. His newest poetry collection is currently nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Award in 2024.

Randi Ward is a poet, translator, lyricist, and photographer from West Virginia. She earned her MA in Cultural Studies from the University of the Faroe Islands and has twice won the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Nadia Christensen Prize.

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Nominated for the 2024 Nordic Council Literature Prize, Kim Simonsen introduces a new perspective to Faroese literature rooted in the materiality of all natural organisms.

The rhetorical title of the collection posits the crisis that is underway. Simonsen asks: as a species among species, all comprised of the matter of the universe, how has our compulsion to hierarchically categorize everything estranged us from ourselves, each other, and the rest of this world? Simonsen challenges our anthropocentric pursuit of knowledge, exploring the human relationship with itself as an element of the natural world. The collection follows the process as the narrator reckons with estrangement from his fellow organisms, and turns to the greater materiality of the world to find continuity, connection, and solace.