“There was nothing Anna wanted more than to write a normal book,” writes Olga Ravn in her new novel, “My Work.” Try as she may, however, the protagonist “kept on writing strange texts that jumped all over the place.” Ravn’s novel is itself a strange text. Through its singular collage of prose, poetry, diary, script and even newspaper scrapbook, Ravn traverses a large swath of textual terrain to explore the surface challenges and deeper significance of her work as both writer and mother.

The diverse structure of “My Work” is appropriate considering Ravn’s literary production so far. In less than a decade, the Danish writer has moved through a range of genres and styles. Her first book to be translated into English, “The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century,” was a dissociated, minimalist piece of science fiction that garnered an International Booker Prize nomination. In “My Work,” she takes a much more personal turn, questioning the “old, entrenched idea that a woman must choose between child and book.”

I spoke with Ravn via Zoom from her home in Copenhagen about her “chopped-up, stuttering book,” kitchen-sink literature and how “My Work” could have gone on forever.

Q: How did the unique structure of your book arise?

A: I don’t really plan. Outlining is kind of a new thing for me when I write, and I think that’s because I come from poetry. I had an idea that I wanted to have both prose and poetry, which is really hard, to not have one dominate the other. Usually when I write I’m not interested in finding the center or the essence of the book; I’m always trying to find out how far I can expand it. With “My Work,” I was just trying to see how many different genres can actually exist together. I have been so inspired by “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin where she talks about the book or the novel as being more like a purse or bag. I wanted to consider the book as a purse or a backpack filled with clutter. Or maybe like a musical chord with different tones, and somehow making them harmonize in different ways.

Q: How are poetry and prose different for you?

A: When I applied for [university], I went to the interview and they asked me, “Okay, so you have applied both with poetry and prose, but what are you going to write?” And I couldn’t answer. It’s been like a dance or struggle for me. Poetry is more related to the now, and prose is much more wonderful to stay in, because you don’t have to invent everything all the time as with poetry.

But then as I got into the groove and published books, I became less and less interested in genres and increasingly obsessed with this late-medieval-art view where there are no genres. [It was a period when] people would make books that would have a fairy tale, a recipe, a verse, an illumination, and the whole idea for a successful art piece was that it would — as the chord — have some kind of harmony. So I’m leaning more and more into that. When I wrote “My Work,” I had the feeling that it could accumulate text forever and that everything could come into the book. I mean everything. Which was at the same time a wonderful, exhilarating feeling and really, really frustrating. And also kind of manic. I think at one point it was like 1,000 pages.

Q: Your last book, “The Employees,” was a very impersonal, almost dissociated book, and now “My Work” is about as personal as it gets. Was that difference intentional?

A: I think that I actually wrote “The Employees” to get away from the manuscript of “My Work,” because I was already writing it. Maybe I needed a palate cleanser. When you read [“My Work”], you get a sense that it’s very personal book, and that is right, but it is also a lot of fiction. And also I really like writing up against tropes. So with “The Employees” it’s very obvious that I’m writing against some sort of science fiction tradition. Everybody will recognize that immediately. And I’m actually doing the same with “My Work” and kitchen-sink literature. I think Doris Lessing is one of the queens of this genre. Women’s lives centered around the house, centered around care work, cleaning, romantic love and everything that is considered to be women’s lives. And I consider that a genre, just as science fiction and realism.

Q: A lot of various sociopolitical concerns lurk in the shadows of “My Work.”

A: I wanted to have politics as the weather, as something that just keeps on happening. Because when you put children into the world or you somehow have children in your care, you start a very concrete relationship with the future. So all this geopolitical stuff is happening, and on one hand you’re taking care of an infant in this closed world that is completely untouched by all this stuff, and on the other, you’re raising a child to step into it. These were two different sorts of times I wanted to portray in the novel. One notion of time I would call “contemporary time,” which was like … there will be new rules or written regulations for how you give birth and it changes all the time. And each time, it will be presented as a rational truth. And then I wanted a completely different experience of time, which we can call “deep time,” that is related to being part of an ancestral line, and having a body that gives birth as all these other bodies do, and feeling an almost tectonic relationship with the planets because you’re putting forward the species.

Q: In “My Work,” you write that “writing is twice as much living as anything else,” and suggest that there can be something truer about fiction than reality.

A: There is living, existing, being, and we call that “reality,” and we don’t actually know how it is for other people. We might not even know how it is for ourselves. And then there is the representation of that reality. And art is in the business of representing the experience. If you talk about the literary genre of realistic depiction, I find that it lacks — is simply not how it is to be alive. To me at least.

By Olga Ravn, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell

New Directions. 400 pp. $18.95, paperback

Nick Hilden writes about the arts, travel, technology and health for numerous publications.