Marble - Amalie Smith

Amalie Smith ignites everyday encounters into sites of revelation and metamorphosis

Recently unearthed from the ground, Marble leaves her new lover in Copenhagen and travels to Athens. The city is overflowing with colour, steam and fragrance, cats cry like babies at night, the economic crisis is raging. In this volatile landscape, Marble grasps the world by exploring its immediate surfaces. Capturing specks of colour on ancient sculptures in the Acropolis Museum with an infrared camera, she simultaneously traces the pioneering sculptor Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen, who spent several months in the same place 110 years earlier. Far away from her husband and children, Carl-Nielsen showed that Archaic sculptures were originally painted in bright colours - a feat which meant defying Victorian gender roles and jeopardising her marriage.

Sensuous and electric, yet admirably forensic in its approach to mineral life, Marble is a galvanizing novel about the materials life is made of, about korai and sponge diving, about looking and looking again, written in a spare and pellucid style.

Praise for Marble

Everything connects. In that Ali Smith/Isabel Waidner way, Amalie Smith manages to stuff a lot of topics in an economic way Enriching and rewarding

- The Bobsphere

A resolute novel that, by virtue of its mix of literary suggestion, aesthetic experience and art historical insight, makes something that is simultaneously straightforwardly concrete and almost incomprehensibly abstract come alive

- Jyllands-Posten

Marble is not reminiscent of much else, but that does not make it odd. Just beautifully its own. It is made of the stuff art and literature is made of. In excess

- Berlingske

Amalie Smith brings marble to life

- Politiken

Admirably vivid

- Information

Marble is an artistically ambitious and original attempt at creating an open, hybrid and 'impure' strand of novel which integrates and supplements fiction with factual and documentary elements Amalie Smith digs into the material with knowledge, sensuality, and aesthetic sensibility

- Litteratursiden

Marble is a novel about insisting on the significance of surfaces, about longing and absorption, about diving and becoming porous. The book thinks across disciplines and aesthetic genre conventions, and hence it is no coincidence that Amalie Smith is a practising artist as well as a writer

- Vagant

AMALIE SMITH (b. 1985) is a Danish writer and visual artist. A graduate from the Danish Academy of Creative Writing and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Smith has published eight hybrid books. She has received numerous awards for her work as an artist and writer, including the Danish Arts Foundation's prestigious three-year working grant, the Danish Crown Prince Couple's Rising Star Award, and the Bodil and Jrgen Munch-Christensen Prize for emerging writers.

JENNIFER RUSSELL has published translations of Amalie Smith, Christel Wiinblad, and Peter-Clement Woetmann. She was the recipient of the 2019 Gulf Coast Prize for her translation of Ursula Scavenius's 'Birdland', and in 2020 she received an American-Scandinavian Foundation Award for her co-translation of Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild's All the Birds in the Sky.