A girl is struck down by polio during the terrifying epidemic of the early 1950s. Paralysed and unable to breathe on her own, she is committed to hospital in Copenhagen and placed in an iron lung. Forty years earlier, near Budapest, a child grows up in an orphanage for boys. The child goes by the name of 'Boy' but is not like the others, as their body seems to transcend the categories of boy or girl. Between these two young people, there is a powerful, enigmatic bond that stretches across time and space.

Prizes

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 as hardly anything else I've read ... Reffstrup's prose is like a magic carpet, delicately woven with the finest threads. 5/6 star.' - Politiken

'A magical story of living in two worlds ... Iron Lung lives and breathes precisely through Reffstrup's sense of style and painterly ability to create literary images. With this novel, she shows her powerful, poetic voice. A writer who isn't afraid to plunge into bold fantasies.' - Dagsavisen

'If you're a good enough writer, you can persuade the reader to accept the most incredible things ... Iron Lung takes us to strange places, exploring different aspects of humanity in poetic, hypnotic, sensuous prose that makes the familiar unfamiliar and brings the 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.