#RivetingReviews: Darcy Hurford reviews ZOMBIELAND by Sørine Steenholdt, translated by Charlotte Barslund

This collection of short stories by Greenlandic author Sørine Steenholdt is compact but powerful. The stories are interspersed with other short texts, while the atmospheric illustrations by Maja-Lisa Kehlet Hansen make you wonder why more fiction for adult readers doesn’t make use of images.

Zombieland was originally published in Greenlandic in 2015. It then appeared in Danish translation by Niviaq Korneliussen and has now been translated into English by Charlotte Barslund. Its subject matter is not easy. Much of it is the nightmarish stuff of social-work case reports all over the world: child abuse, addiction, manslaughter, intergenerational trauma, recurring violence, particularly against women and children. Steenholdt brings a Greenlandic angle: Greenland’s own Inuit culture, the smallness of its society and the issues it lives with. Many parents have experienced the challenges of raising a neurodivergent child, but for a grandparent to embrace it by telling the child he is born to be a shaman, as happens in the story ‘Shaman’ is culture-specific. Likewise, a housing fire is a tragic possibility everywhere, but it is unusual for the narrator to speak of growing up in a house made of peat and stones, as in the story ‘Qinngorput’.

Alcohol abuse is a recurring theme, woven skilfully with the effects of colonialism, particularly in the story ‘Mum Is Just a Word’. This is set at the funeral of the first-person narrator’s mother, a long-term alcoholic. Most attendees seem to be former drinking companions. She notes that not a single man is in Greenlandic national dress: they can’t, she thinks, as they need to wear ‘oversized jackets whose pockets hold so many more bottles’. She herself is in national dress, but it produces conflicting feelings in her:

‘My thoughts and my Greenlandic national costume are suffocating me. The too heavy bead collar makes my forehead sweat and my glum thoughts give me claustrophobia. […] Since taking them out their heaviness has reminded me that my country is nothing but a burden, that my people are a burden to me.’

Several stories touch on suicide. A look at the statistics suggest why. In 2023, the suicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants was 9.39 for the UK and 8.34 for Ireland, according to WHO. In Greenland it was 71.3, (according to a 2024 report for the Nordic Council of Ministers) and Greenland has a population of around fifty-six thousand. Let those figures run around in the mind, and it is clear that suicide is a palpable part of lived experience for Greenlanders, unlike elsewhere. This seems as good a place as any to mention that the Greenlandic-to-Danish translator of Zombieland, Niviaq Korneliussen, is herself an author. While her first novel is available in English translation (Crimson, translated by Anna Halager), her second, Naasuliardarpi (‘Valley of the Flowers’), which centres on suicide, is not, despite winning the Nordic Council literature prize in 2020, being translated into Danish by the author and now available in around a dozen other languages.

The last story of Steenholdt’s collection, the titular ‘Zombieland’, takes place in a setting quite different to what has gone before. More secure, more middle class: a university’s cross-faculty dinner. The narrator, a female student, comments on whether other women have got their dresses from Nuuk or abroad, and notes that the band are playing Greenlandic music. Initially this all feels safe, until the attendees begin checking their phones and are shocked at a news item about Greenland’s premier. The people around them start looking strange: ‘Scary, distorted faces. They look normal until they are shrouded in puffs of smoke and when they reappear, they are warped and horrifying.’ As she leaves the event, a man sitting at the back of a coach gives her an unpleasant smile: ‘Yet again I see long, sharp teeth and bloodless lips. I press my eyes shut and when I open them again, he looks completely normal.’ As the discontent with the prime minister turns into protests in the streets the following day, the same distorted faces appear, first on the prime minister, then on the protesters. Without wishing to repeat Kristen Thisted’s analysis in the afterword, there seem to be plenty of zombies in Greenland, even where you would least expect them.

Reviewed by Darcy Hurford

ZOMBIELAND

Written by Sørine Steenholdt

Translated by Charlotte Barslund

Published by Norvik Press (2025)

June 2026 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

Darcy Hurford is a translator from Estonian, Finnish, German and Swedish. Originally from England, she is now based in Belgium.

Read Darcy Hurford’s #‎RivetingReview of THE LIVES AND DEATHS OF K. PENZA by Clare Azzopardi

Read Darcy Hurford’s #‎RivetingReview of KŪNAI by Tomas Vaiseta, Jurga Tumasonytė, Virginija Kulvinskaitė, Akvilė Kavaliauskaitė and Vidas Morkūnas

Read Darcy Hurford’s #‎RivetingReview of THE SINGULARITY by Balsam Karam

Read Darcy Hurford’s #‎RivetingReview of ÆDNAN. AN EPIC by Linnea Axelsson

Read Darcy Hurford’s #‎RivetingReview of OF SAINTS AND MIRACLES by Manuel Astur