”Leonora’s Journey is a genre-expanding and enormously successful piece of art and literary criticism about the British-born painter and writer Leonora Carrington (1917-2011). With great intensity, Susanne Chrisensen writes about Carrington who at the young age of 20 travels with the German painter Max Ernst to Paris to become an artist and is whirled into surrealism’s fantasy about the very young woman, la femme enfant. Carrington rebels against the attempts to turn her into a muse and creates a position for herself as an independent artist and writer in Mexico. Along the way, Susanne Christensen offers elegant, catchy readings of Leonora Carrington’s works … Christensen is quite unique as a critic, because she is not afraid to speculate and expand on Carrinton’s transformational creations … in Leonora’s Journey, Susanne Christensen succeeds in showing the continued relevance of [Carrington’s] works by connecting them with everything from ecocriticism and feminism to shifting mythologies and science fiction … Leonora’s Journey is both a monography, literary criticism and travel writing, consistently written in an imaginative and expressive prose that plays with the performative … Leonora Carrington was most definitely an autobiographical artist, but in Susanne Christensen’s work she becomes just as much a way to think and write, a hybrid figure dissolving all borders and layers”
Jury statement for the Georg Brandes Prize (Denmark)

“In the footsteps of the surrealist Leonora Carrington, past ecofeminism, cultural workers, Star Wars and coral reefs. Unreality hunger!”
Carline Tromp, Klassekampen, Best of 2019

“Christensen’s third book cements her position as a brilliant essayist, a writer with the courage to go her own ways … The music of this book is entirely unique”
Hilde Østby, Aftenposten

“A magnificent apologia for the validity of art criticism. Cultural worker Susanne Christensen dons a pair of surreal sunglasses, and throws a blindingly clear gaze at our time throught the dreamy vision of the forgotten artist Leonora Carrington … In a personal and hearfelt way she weaves her own precarious existence as an art critic and cultural worker in out of Leonora’s life as an artist … this essay is a completely overwhelming piece of literature … It’s quite simply extraordinarly impressive … Susanne Christensen simply writes insanely well”
Karl Emil Rosenbæk, BLA

“Impressive … With Leonora’s Journey, Christensen has in an exemplary way shown how one can and should write about art. She manages to write about surrealism in a light, cool prose that makes the heavy material fly across the book pages. Carrington’s art, her writings and paintings, are, in Christensen’s interpretation, woven together with questions surrounding climate, mental health and … Donald Trump himself. It’s an impressive book on one artist’s oeuvre, but more importantly, Christensen shows how art in general can be written about in a way that doesn’t make it seem like something out of a museum, but on the contrary topical and significant.
Kristian Hegertun, Vårt Land

“Alchemy and animal magic, surrealism and exile. Leonora Carrington’s life was created for literature … lots of surprising and thought-provoking passages … There are some really bold leaps of thought in Christensen’s book, such as when she situates Leonora Carrington in the final fighting scene in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), light sabres in the snow and all. At first glance the anachronism seems estranging, but it turns out to hang together impeccably”
Espen Hauglid, Morgenbladet