Kâlánguak Absalonsen: The journey to the red house, my home, before I was adopted

Kâlánguak Absalonsen is a Greenlandic writer and activist who is prominently engaged in debates about the adoption of Greenlandic children. She was born in Sisimiut and, at the age of three (1975), was adopted into a Danish family, where she grew up under the name Karen. Her childhood was marked by a sense of uprootedness, loss of identity, and everyday encounters with racism—motifs that later became central to her literary work. In her books, she draws on her own life story, transforming it into an urgent, intimate narrative about memory and the search for home. Her debut Lille (Little One) presents the painful experience of separation from the perspective of a three-year-old child, while the autobiographically inspired novel K (2024) follows the coming of age of an adopted girl in a Danish environment and sensitively captures the tension between her roots and her life in an adoptive family. Alongside her literary work, Absalonsen has long advocated for recognition of human rights violations associated with the adoption of Greenlandic children in the 1960s and 1970s. She collaborates with initiatives addressing discrimination and remains actively engaged in public life. Her personal story has also been explored in the podcast series Rejsen til det røde hus (The Journey to the Red House).