Nº31 Niviaq Korneliussen

Niviaq Korneliussen is a Greenlandic writer who grew up in the isolated town of Nanortalik, on Greenland’s southern coast. The town’s name means “the Place of Polar Bears” in greenlandic.

Korneliussen was born in 1990 and was only 24 years old when she published her debut novel, Homo Sapienne, which was an instant hit. She wrote it and published it in the Greenlandic language, which is quite special because Greenland produces relatively few homegrown authors (being only 56.000 people), and few books are translated into Greenlandic as most people there can speak Danish.

Today, Homo Sapienne has been translated into at least 7 languages. 

Homo Sapienne was noted for both its display of modern storytelling and for its portrayal of LGBTQ+ people in modern Greenlandic society. Korneliussen said it was important for her to write about gay life in Greenland because she had never encountered anything about homosexuality in Greenlandic literature.