Tabita

Living in Greenland in the mid 1960s, a time when the country’s political relations with Denmark are strained, a Danish couple, Eva and Berthel, who are quarrelling themselves, return to Denmark with their two adopted children. Tabita and Vitus have to tread carefully in a family minefield that is fraught with secrets, a past left unspoken and the myriad of tensions between two cultures, not to mention their new parents. And the children have to leave their biological mother behind in Greenland. Abelone was the maidservant in the Danish couple‘s home and, finding herself in difficult circumstances, was compelled to leave her two youngest children to the care of her employers.

Iben Mondrup writes a clever and finely sketched portrayal of a family atmosphere where two siblings have to fight for themselves and each other.

About the author 

Born in Copenhagen in 1969, Iben Mondrup moved to Greenland with her family when she was three years old, but returned to Copenhagen at the age of eighteen to attend the Academy of the Arts. Mondrup made her literary debut in 2009 and her novels have been published to great critical acclaim ever since: Nominated for the Danish Readers’ Choice Prize and the weekly newspaper Weekendavisen’s Literary Prize, Godhavn was awarded the Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s Novel of the Year in 2014, and Karensminde was awarded the prestigious Karen Blixen Prize in 2017.

Text translated by Lin Falk van Rooyen