Winner of the Aschehoug Prize 2024
Winner of the Dobloug Prize 2021
Winner of the Critics’ Prize 2018
Longlisted for the Prix Femina 2021 (France)
Nominated for the Triztan Vindtorn Poetry Prize 2024
Nominated for the Booksellers’ Prize 2018
Nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize 2014
Winner of the Unified Language Prize 2012

Mona Høvring (born 1962) made her debut as a poet in 1998, and has since published five more collections of poetry and four novels. Her first novel, the acclaimed Something That Helps, came out in 2004. After her 2012 novel The Waiting Room in the Atlantic, she was awarded the Unified Language Prize. In 2013, her third novel, Camilla’s Long Nights, was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. After the highly praised book of poetry Girl with Skull (2017), she returned to prose with the novel Because Venus Crossed an Alp Violet on the Day I Was Born. A definite breakthrough for the author, the book won the Critics’ Prize, became a finalist for the Booksellers’ Prize and ended up on numerous critics’ best of 2018 lists.

“[Høvring] has never written a book longer than 130 pages. And yet, [her] works are very weighty in literary terms. … The works are characterized by a rare ability to formulate condensed, surprising sentences that seek existential insight, as well as great linguistic, formal, and thematic richness. … The texts feel as if they are poured directly from a brimful well of slow-flowing melancholy, feelings of loss, and longing for inner peace, but also of bubbling desire and bliss at being met with grace, or catching sight of the sacred. At the same time, there is little reverence for these overwhelming core experiences of human life; the language is often seemingly simple and always bold…. [Her books] are extrovert and genre-expanding, twisting motifs and forms from myths and biblical texts.”
From the Aschehoug Prize jury statement