By Sofie Riis Endahl, as told to Karoline Markholst and translated by Hazel Evans

Sofie Riis Endahl on one of the big questions of 2025

“I'm currently doing my Masters in Computer Science, so I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of artificial intelligence in our world. I’ve always been deeply interested in the topic of man versus ‘machine’, and the books I've written often focus on the how social media shapes young people and our relationships. Now that I'm older and have a better academic understanding of the field, I’m expanding on these reflections in my current novel project.”

“The book doesn’t have a title yet, but it’s my first novel for adults and explores the possibilities and pitfalls of artificial intelligence in fiction – specifically the role of AI in the art world, and what rights we as individuals have to our own data, when the giant corporations who control it are fundamentally driven by profit. Being a small person in a huge world both frightens and fascinates me.”

Sofie Riis Endahl on encountering resistance on the road to publication
“Before PIXIE IS STILL ALIVE was published by Byens forlag, another publisher turned it down on the basis that I was too young to write it. They thought Pixie (and probably implicitly me) was too naive, too self-absorbed and ‘too much’. I was 19 at the time, and I don’t know how I managed to shrug the rejection off. But I did. I remember thinking, with the kind of confidence you only have at 19: ‘Lol, they’ve got this all wrong. I’ll show them.’ So I didn't change Pixie. It was a book about being 19, and I was 19, so why should Pixie be more mature than me? The whole point of the book was to portray life in the transition between high school and a gap year as honestly and precisely as possible, and I'm really proud I stayed true to that. At 19, you’re naive, self-absorbed and too much, but you’re also captivating, brilliant and original.”

“When I spoke openly in the media about how the novel drew on my own experience of the rush of graduation and the ensuing emptiness after gymnasium, it allowed me to connect with my readers on a whole new level. Even though by now it's happened many times, I’m still so touched whenever a girl comes up to me after a reading or at a book fair and says ‘I'm Pixie’ – to which I reply, ‘So am I’. It's very special to be able to bond like that with so few words, like a togetherness formed from sharing the experience of having been left out. Moments like these mean at lot to me.”

Sofie Riis Endahl on seeing her writing through the eyes of others
“When I was in New York – as part of the Danish Arts Foundation's career programme ‘The Young Artistic Elite’ – I was working with a composer on the musical adaptation of PIXIE IS STILL ALIVE, and I was repeatedly struck by how all the American composers responded to the story. The honesty, rawness and especially the amount of sex and sexual freedom in the book seemed to awe them, but I hadn’t given any of these things much thought when I wrote it.”