Niviaq Korneliussen was born in 1990 in Nuuk and grew up in Nanortalik, a small town in Southern Greenland. She participated in 2012 in the short story competition Allatta! (let us write!) for young unpublished authors in Greenland, where she was appointed as one of ten winners. Her short story "San Francisco" was published the following year in the short story collection Young in Greenland – Young in the World (trans. title). This led to invitations to several Nordic literary events – among these was an invitation to lead one of the workshops in the newly started festival for Nordic literature, txt.ville 2014, in Copenhagen. All the while she was still active in Greenland where she co-arranged Poetry Slams as well as literary debates in Nuuk.

Niviaq’s independent novel debut came in the autumn of 2014 with HOMO sapienne, which she originally wrote in Greenlandic before rewriting it into Danish. Her novel was highly praised in the media and was since then nominated for the Politiken Literature Award as well as for the Nordic Council Literature Award, 2015.

Niviaq has also been awarded a prize by the Danish Arts Foundation’s literature committee that selected HOMO sapienne as one of five books from the fall, 2014, that has a significant impact on contemporary Danish literature today.