Niviaq Korneliussen

Meet “the literary face of Greenland,” said Sarah Ditum in The Economist’s 1843 magazine. Not that 28-year-old Niviaq Korneliussen has much competition: Her homeland— the world’s biggest island— has a population smaller than that of Bismarck,

N.D., and years can pass before a new Greenlandic author wins publication. Even so, Korneliussen’s debut novel, Last Night in Nuuk, is special. First published four years ago under a different title, the book focuses on the lives and loves of five young LGBT Greenlanders, and stirs together texts, pop lyrics, and stream of consciousness. “Young people didn’t really have a voice in Greenlandic literature,” she says. “I wanted to write something I could recognize myself in.” The novel was a best-seller in Greenland and Denmark and eventually will appear in a dozen translations.

Not everyone at home was thrilled with the novel. “When my book was published, people asked, ‘Have you had some issues in your childhood?’” Korneliussen says. “Because it’s not normal that a Greenlander criticizes her own people.” Greenlandic novels of the past, she says, have been big on “fearless hunters who are at one with nature,” and often have celebrated the territory’s independence movement. Because she’s teaching a creative-writing class while working on her second novel, she knows there’s more to be told. Many of her students, she says, haven’t read a single novel or short story, but they have heartfelt tales to share about growing up in a land plagued by joblessness, alcohol, and suicide—and about transcending such challenges. “I can assure you that stories are told—they are told orally,” she says. “We just have to write them down.”