Juliane Rui

Juliane Rui (b. 1982) is a Norwegian poet. She made her debut in 2011 with the poetry collection Den hesten er av snø (English translation: That Horse is Made of Snow), and has published a total of seven poetry collections, most recently Dråpen på ørkentungen (English translation: The Drop on the Desert Tongue) (2025). Through her poems, she explores various aspects of existence and language, in a continuous dialogue with everything from family members to other animal species to gods. Rui writes thought-provoking and subtly humorous pieces about things that are small, close, and of the everyday, but which may at the same time turn out to be the most valuable in our lives. Rui received the prestigious writer’s grant from Bokhandlerforeningen in 2018.

Juliane Rui is a Norwegian poet with seven books to her credit. She made her debut in 2011 with the volume ‘That Horse is of Snow’, a book that received truly enthusiastic reviews and thematically drew on classic subjects like humans and nature, but which at the same time created surprising new perspectives, its expression being rooted in a powerful and mature linguistic intention. In one of the poems in that volume she explores language itself: 

It rains. What is it
in it rains. Is it the word.
When it’s cold in autumn
is it skin, in autumn?
Over the browbone, down
so slowly, that which draws
is it standing still. 

Her next two publications in the following years: ‘Sisters can be the same age’ and ‘So empty movement can be sensed’ confirmed her place as a leading light in the younger generation of poets. In 2019 she was awarded the authors’ scholarship from the Society of Booksellers, where the judges offered this as part of their wider commentary: ‘Rui is a writer with individuality and integrity. An awareness that human-driven changes threaten our surroundings is explicit but at the same time muted is one of several abilities the author possesses with regard to writing about nature.’ It is precisely this ecological aspect that would occupy more room and evolve considerably indeed giddily in the years that followed. 

In the wake of this award Juliane Rui has been extremely productive and brought out new books almost annually. The collection ‘Spin my Meadow’ from 2020 sent out the clear message that Rui was in pursuit of more defined themes in her already solid authorship. The ecological thinking became more explicit; in this book with a child being the object of the poet-hunter’s tales regarding what natural and species diversity it’s a part of. The critic Hadle Oftedal wrote of this book in the culturally important paper Class War: ‘Juliane Rui may have the finest political voice in poetry today’, and he puts her into his reading in an eco-poetic framework. 

A clearly defined break came with ‘Oumuamua’ in 2022. An ambitious promise of a book which in its bulkiness was greater than all of her previous writing and which invoked figures from the world of the gods of antiquity. As here she invokes one of the nine muses from the Classical myths: 

Euterpe, I cannot sleep
I think of poetry
from the beginning of longing the poem beheld me
with its heavenly blue eyes
so with its deepened eyes
and lingering glance is it the poem’s dream?

A still more multi-faceted style of writing manifested itself, yet there lurks a decided darkness behind this apparently easy, springing playfulness. The critic Carina Beddari in the prestigious newspaper Morgenbladet writes that ‘The comination of everydayness and cosmic metaphysics gives Rui’s poetry a particular intense nearness in a Norwegian context’. It’s worth noting that this book appeared from a different publisher than before, namely the quality-assured Oktober. The four first books appeared from Samlaget, the publisher known for representing writers of the less-used form of Norwegian nynorsk. Rui opted also to alter her chosen form of Norwegian following that change of publisher. 

The book ‘The Earth Writes’ from 2023 was commissioned for Møllebyen Literature Festival which is held in the town of Moss by the organisation House of Foundation, which acted also as publisher for this piece of work. Here she gives a voice to the planet, something expressed in a verse like this: 

There are too many dead, I whisper
The earth whispers back:
The dead are well nourishment? 

In 2025 Juliana Rui brought out her most recent publication: ‘The Drop on the Desert’s Tongue’. 

Here the mystical offerings are in even greater abundance. The book is short, but written in an elevated tone reminiscent of Biblical language, at the same time that she opens the chamber of language to modern words and expressions, something that lends it a whiff of playfulness. In Juliane Rui Norwegian poetry has found a truly strong voice who digs deep as a writer into the environmental battle in which the world is engaged. This is authorship displaying truly gripping development. 

Written by Henning H. Bergsvåg