HOMO sapienne
HOMO sapienne follows the lives of five young people in the “little big city” of Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. Each one is given a chapter in the book to narrate their feelings and experiences at a time in their lives, when they all experience profound changes. Through the five voices, the novel expresses different views on identity, sexuality and on being young in a modern Greenland where tabus are slowly broken down. As is the language which in the novel originally is a modern Greenlandic saturated with English slang and Danish frases.
This project has been funded with support from the Creative Europe Programme of the European Commission.
Niviaq Korneliussen
Niviaq Korneliussen was born in 1990 in Nuuk and grew up in Nanortalik, a small town in Southern Greenland. She participated in 2012 in the short story competition Allatta! for young unpublished authors in Greenland, where she was appointed as one of ten winners. Her short story San Francisco was published the following year in the short story collection Young in Greenland – Young in the World (trans. title).
Niviaq’s independent novel debut came in the autumn of 2014 with HOMO sapienne, which she originally wrote in Greenlandic before rewriting it into Danish. Her novel was highly praised in the media and was since then nominated for the Politiken Literature Award as well as for the Nordic Council Literature Award, 2015.
Niviaq has also been awarded a prize by the Danish Arts Foundation’s literature committee that selected HOMO sapienne as one of five books from the fall, 2014, that has a significant impact on contemporary Danish literature today.
