A Girl Left the Room

At her father's art exhibition, fourteen-year-old Tanja is introduced to Eg. Handsome and grey-eyed, he is a friend of her parents, a man who makes his living with words and sees something extraordinary in her. Soon, letters begin to arrive at her home in the Swedish forest. Pages spinning a private fairytale dreamed up just for her, inviting Tanja into a love that promises escape from her lonely childhood.

But when the two finally meet, Tanja steps through a door into an adult experience from which there is no return, where desire and excitement soon give way to shame and control. Years later, now a poet herself and armed with the language to name what happened, she uncovers a box of Eg's letters coated with mildew and begins to read.

Hauntingly lyrical and fearlessly honest, A Girl Left the Room is a novel about a relationship of intense connection, unequal power and one woman's defiant effort to reclaim the girl she once was.



Ulrikka S. Gernes is a Danish poet and writer. She was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2016 and later served as a juror. She has received multiple grants from the Danish Arts Foundation and is also the author of several children's books. Her debut novel, A Girl Left the Room, became a Danish bestseller. Ulrikka has an adult daughter and lives in Copenhagen in an apartment filled with art and books.Caroline Waight is an award-winning literary translator working from Danish, German, and Norwegian into English. Her work includes translations of authors such as Caroline Albertine Minor, Ingvild Rishøi, Maren Uthaug, and Dorthe Nors. She was a finalist for the 2023 PEN Translation Prize and received a special commendation in the 2023 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Caroline is based near London.