Writer born in Nanortalik (Greenland) in 1990.
Niviaq Korneliussen was born on 27 January 1990 in Nanortalik, a small village in southern Greenland, where she spent her childhood. The daughter of Arnaq and Jens Korneliussen, she has two sisters, Kulunnguaq and Tukummeq. As a teenager, she travelled to the United States as part of an exchange program. During her youth, she grew fond of writing, though she did not draw her inspiration specifically from the Greenlandic literature she studied in school nor from her uncle, a writer.
Niviaq Korneliussen began studying social sciences at the University of Greenland (Ilisimatusarfik; Nuuk); she paused her studies in 2012 for two reasons: she began to work for artists’ associations in Nuuk and her short story “San Francisco” won a contest organized by the Greenlandic publishing house Milik. “San Francisco” was published in Greenlandic (2013) and later translated into Danish (2015) and English (2017); a semi-autobiographical story, it recounts the experience of a young lesbian discovering California. The story marked the beginning of Niviaq Korneliussen’s writing career: after winning a government scholarship, she published her first novel in Greenlandic, Homo Sapienne, with Milik in 2014. She translated the novel into Danish herself the same year, and it was subsequently translated into German as Nuuk #ohne Filter (literally: Nuuk #nofilter) in 2015, into French as Homo sapienne (2017), into English in both the UK (Crimson, 2018) and the USA (Last Night in Nuuk, 2019), also into Czech (2019), Bulgarian (2024) and other languages. Homo sapienne revolves around the interrelated stories of five young people in postcolonial Greenland as they as explore their identities. The novel was a resounding success, selling 3,000 copies in Greenland, becoming a bestseller in Denmark and earning Niviaq Korneliussen a nomination for the Nordic Council Literature Prize.
Niviaq Korneliussen has come to exemplify the revival of Greenlandic literature and her novel is studied in schools. After interrupting her studies in psychology at the University of Aarhus in Denmark in 2015, she participated in speaking engagements across several Nordic countries until 2018. Though Niviaq Korneliussen refuses to be defined as an activist author or as the spokesperson for Greenlandic youth, her novel develops a critique of postcolonial Greenland and its contradictions, namely when it comes to identity, which has resulted in angry reactions and threats from some members of her community. In 2016, Niviaq Korneliussen contributed to a collection of short stories by Nina Kreutzmann Jørgensen (Avannersumut sassarpoq; literally: « North facing » – Danish: Hun står i nordenvind). In 2020, she published another novel in Danish, Blomsterdalen, which was translated the same year into Greenlandic as Naasuliardarpi, then into French (2022, under the title La vallée des fleurs) and into other languages. The novel deals with depression and suicide, sensitive issues in Greenlandic society. She won the Nordic Council Literature Prize for this novel.
Today, Niviaq Korneliussen lives in Nuuk with her partner Nina Kreutzmann and their son.
Report on Niviaq Korneliussen in Montréal (in French and English)
Reading by Niviaq Korneliussen in Montréal (in French and Greenlandic)