Courtney Addison

Courtney is an anthropologist and New Zealander, and has spent recent years wandering the globe, mostly while wishing she was home on the farm with a good book. She would like you to read more Janet Frame and spend more time outside, please.

 

 

 

 

 

GioGiovanna Barbara Alesandro

Giovanna, wildly gifted pedestrian, yet is able to remain humble. Would love to engineer a lovechild/super-breed author between Ben Lerner and Chris Kraus, but will also settle for a coffee table book with pictures of them and/or a documentary where they walk the Camino together.

 

 

 

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Emilie Bryde Bang-Jensen

Aspiring writer and avid reader of fiction. Has an odd penchant for white, American male authors such as Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, and Jonathan Franzen. Likes to discuss the failings of neoliberalism and other systems of oppression. Has yet to find a way to do anything about them. Had her eyes opened by postcolonial and gender theory (which has yet to do anything to her love of aforementioned white American male authors). Prefers Nescafé over real coffee, which everyone in the bookshop finds strange.  

 

 

HannahHannah Bergqvist

A curious Bookscapes Creative and avid (re-)reader with more than 100 books on her Top 3-list due to an inherent inability (disguised as stubborn refusal) to choose One Favourite Reading Experience. With a present preference for books on Reading & Creativity Management (a contradiction in terms really), Hannah likes to contemplate the aesthetics of parentheses and digital/future bookscapes. She spends most of her waking hours working at the bookish frontiers, currently as Producer of Augmented Reality books. Hannah likes having many fish to fry, so besides work work she also runs her own business as freelance English Translator & Editor and uses whatever spare time is left on family & friends, food club dinners and choir rehearsals. For this reason, she can almost only be physically found at Ark on Sundays.

 

 

alexAlexander Buk-Swienty

Alexander happily holds a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Copenhagen. He currently works for a literary agency where he spends his time staring out the window and writing e-mails to obscure publishers in Eastern Europe. He is ostensibly a volunteer at Ark Books, but no one can remember the last time he took a shift. For the Ark Review he writes various analysis of literary things with Lacan as the theoretical spearhead. A deceivingly brilliant field to pick of course, because no one understands Lacan, and thus Alexander comes off as smart. He asks for all complaints or disagreements concerning his articles be addressed to the big Other.

 

 

Neus Casanova Vico

Neus spends a considerable amount of her time thinking about Clarice Lispector in general and Sylvia Plath’s poems in particular. She’s a firm supporter of the Weil team in the which-Simone-is-better battle. She once read Infinite Jest and still talks about it today. She’s one half of the monthly column Translation Tuesday, tends to overuse the word “nice” and, apparently, the pronoun “she” when she writes her bio.

 

 

Ilinca Creţu

Ilinca has a masters in English from University of Copenhagen. Originally from Bucharest, she lived in Vienna, London and now the Capital of Denmark. Interested in postcolonial literature and literatures of diasporas – mainly because displacement has been her reality in the past 10 years.

 

 

 

Henriette Klejs Engelberg

An English scholar flaneuring the streets (and searching the store) to find out what to do with life. While asking herself such grand questions, Henriette writes harsh(ish) book reviews and tries to run the bookstore behind the scenes, where she keeps a stern eye on each volunteer and their workload to keep her love of systems and control in check. Perhaps she should rather be curled up in the store’s leather armchair with Virginia Woolf… With ‘Street Haunting’ as her favourite read, Woolf will be this ark reviewers main inspiration for future contributions and walking will be her preferred means to reach each end result.    

 

Magnus Friis

Somewhat sceptical of short biographical texts but has always wanted one of those snassy black-and-white author photos, complete with piercing gaze and turtleneck, that often accompany them. He is made up almost entirely of the people around him so if you’re that interested maybe you should go read their short biographical texts for a change.

 

 

 

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Macon Holt

When Macon started at ark books he had spent years trying to shoehorn Infinite Jest into a PhD about popular music and capitalism. He managed to do this by making it about something called sonic fiction. He is one-half of the Ark Audio Book Club podcast team and the reason why the critical theory section is an odd mix of Adorno and Deleuze & Guattari. For many months he was mistaken for a ghost that had decided to haunt the store, but it was just him writing his book (Pop Music and Hip Ennui: A Sonic Fiction of Capitalist Realism) and/or the podcast. Here he writes about things which might be true or are entirely made up.

 

 

Sheikha Gross

Student of Migration Studies at Copenhagen University. Loves napping, cooking and dancing to techno. Writes a blog, but will never be 10/10 woke, because she is too wayne (often described as “my craziest friend”). She really lives for the lol, but is also a deadly serious queer feminist activist.

 

 

 

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Franek Korbanski

Lives in Copenhagen, volunteers at Ark, has a degree in philosophy and political science. Wrote his thesis on the notion of Angst in Heidegger’s philosophy, his dissertation on Arendt’s account of totalitarianism.

 

 

 

 

Anne Kristin Kristiansen

When I showed this selfportrait (I don’t do portraits usually – if I don’t get asked to) to one of my very good friends, we both burst out in laughter – started fragmenting everything:

‘the eyebrows are great’

‘did you see the nose, isn’t it so weird!’

‘the eyes…’

…we kept going quite a while.

So fragments are what you get. It’s anyway all we get all the time and we puzzle along. : )

She studied art at the Academy in Essen, the beaux-arts in Paris and finished her MA at the Art Academy in Copenhagen. Apart from that she holds a BA in ‘Philosophie und Kulturreflexion’. If you want to see, what she loves doing and spends all her time on, check out her webpage: http://annekristinkristiansen.com/

And then she likes these beautiful moments with family, friends, reading, writing, at good exhibitions and the bookstore with the splendid volunteers.

 

 

Rebecca Linn

She works underpaid jobs and talks more about writing than she actually gets down to it. She likes american writers who have lost their mind at one point or another. She likes Hilton Als, Carrie Mae Weems, the first poems by Eileen Myles, juice, Nell Zink and others.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rebecca Lund

Rebecca is a feminist academic and activist. She has far too many projects for her own good; she leaves a massive carbon footprint annually; and is always searching for excuses to rest under a tree with a novel and a glass of wine. She misses the Finnish forests; would like to visit Cinemateket more often and ought to exercise more regularly. She has far to many projects for her own good and can be found by following a trail of half finished cups of coffee and/or tea.

 

Dooley Murphy

Dooley is a cognitivist and media theorist by training and affiliation. He’s inexplicably excited about the latest, most expensive representational form, Virtual Reality. “Inexplicably” because he finds the majority of VR to have emerged so far—narrative, ludic, and artistic alike—to be so woefully under-informed and uninspiring that he’s going to have to have to remedy the situation by making VR experiences himself. He enjoys surrealist existentialism whatever the medium.

 

Sarah Ommanney

 

Sarah Ommanney 

Sarah, former child prodigy, has now shed the vanities of youth by shaving off her eyebrows, yet continues to impress. She has co-authored several books with Giovanna Alesandro and regularly shocks the artworld with her world-renowned cartoons.

 

 

Snorri Rafn Hallsson

Snorri’s life is not an easy one. Having spent years studying the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, he yearns to be a modernist, an impossibly difficult task in this day and age. When he is not mourning the loss of universality and wistfully longing for the concreteness of the past he fills up his time making podcasts for the Ark Audio Review, figuring that since he spent five years getting a master’s in philosophy, he might as well put that knowledge to use by entertaining you.

 

 

Image uploaded from iOS

Ebba Wester

Ebba loves literature, but has a BA in the slightly lower ranked art form of cinema, (a nerdy theory degree, not an arty filmmaking one). She likes Pauline Kael and is a big defender of Trash culture, balancing her Netflix time carefully between RuPaul’s Drag Race and teen movies from the 90s. She wrote her dissertation on gender and cyborgs, her two favorite topics of conversation. Ebba spends most of her time listening to pop-culture podcasts, trying to read philosophy and just generally being a bit pretentious. She wants to write about pop/high/low culture, and is looking to do a masters in film studies in 2017.

 

Toke Wichmann Larsen

Toke laughs at puns and existential despair, suppresses the urge to correct your spelling and enjoys long walks down postcolonial and literary avenues.