Set in Copenhagen during the terrifying polio epidemic of the early 1950s, Iron Lung is a poetic allegory of adolescence, and an unsettling and subtle exploration of sexuality, medicine, and technology.
A girl is struck down by polio during the terrifying epidemic ofthe early 1950s. Paralysed and unable to breathe on her own,she is committed to hospital in Copenhagen and placed inan iron lung. Forty years earlier, near Budapest, a child grows up in anorphanage for boys. The child goes by thename of 'Boy' but is not like the others, as their body seems totranscend the categories of boy or girl. Between these twoyoung people, there is a powerful, enigmatic bond thatstretches across time and space.
Winner of Stig Saeterbakken Memorial Prize 2023
'Reading Iron Lung felt like remembering a past life, at once so foreign and familiar. With her lucid, pulsating sentences, as poetic as they are precise, Kirstine Reffstrup pierces a little hole in history and pulls a thin, but shining thread through it: a vital and very moving connection between two distant young children living at the edges of time and normality. The result is a wonderfully singular novel that is both historically rooted and full of queer fabulation, both violent and brimming with a desire for embodiment and connection.' - Jonas Eika, author of After the Sun
‘What if bodies were not told as pathologies or perversions but rather as stories of spiders, rivers, eggs, and laboured breaths? With sensuous sensitivity, Iron Lung imagines the queer twinnings that arise between bodies cast aside by the twentieth century.’ - Selby Wynn Schwartz, author of After Sappho
‘A wonderful book: writing which is so vital and so visual coupled with a story which is strange, psychedelic, precise and filled with melancholy. Virtuosic work.' - Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, author of The End of Nightwork
'As saturated with colours, sounds, scents,tactile sensations and fantastic imagery ashardly anything else I've read ... Reffstrup'sprose is like a magic carpet, delicately wovenwith the finest threads. 5/6 star.' - Politiken
'A magical story of living in two worlds ...Iron Lung lives and breathes precisely throughReffstrup's sense of style and painterly abilityto create literary images. With this novel, sheshows her powerful, poetic voice. A writerwho isn't afraid to plunge into bold fantasies.' - Dagsavisen
'If you're a good enough writer, you canpersuade the reader to accept the mostincredible things ... Iron Lung takes us tostrange places, exploring different aspects ofhumanity in poetic, hypnotic, sensuous prosethat makes the familiar unfamiliar and bringsthe eerie close to us.'- NRK
Kirstine Reffstrup was born in Denmark and lives in Norway. Her first novel, I, Unica, was published to great acclaim in 2016 and was nominated for literary prizes in both Norway and Denmark. Her second novel, Iron Lung, was first published in 2023 and was nominated for the prestigious Politiken Literature Prize. The same year she was awarded Stig Saeterbakken's Memorial Prize.
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