Martin Aitken

Martin Aitken is an English literary translator who has spent most of his career rendering Scandinavian fiction into English. Originally from the north of England, he studied community theatre and creative writing in Newcastle before settling in Denmark, where he completed a PhD in linguistics and spent years teaching at Copenhagen Business School. He eventually left academia to translate full-time, going on to become one of the most prolific and decorated translators working from Danish -- and, more recently, Norwegian and Swedish -- into English, with credits including novels by Peter Hoeg, Kim Leine, Hanne Orstavik, Ida Jessen and Karl Ove Knausgaard. His honors include the American-Scandinavian Foundation's Nadia Christensen Prize (2012), the PEN America Translation Prize (2019) and the US National Translation Award in Prose (2022); his translations of Olga Ravn's fiction have twice reached the International Booker Prize lists, shortlisted for The Employees in 2021 and longlisted for The Wax Child in 2026. He continues to live and work in Denmark. In this catalogue he is credited as the translator of three Department Q novels by Jussi Adler-Olsen: Redemption (2013), Guilty (2013) and Buried (2014).