Icelander - Novelist | February 18, 1959 - 2
I'm trying to write about serious issues, about Iceland's journey into modernity, about the soul of Iceland - on how people react when they get too much money too quickly and how it affects our culture.
Hallgrimur Helgason
JourneyCultureMoneySoulPeople
Everything is very expensive in Iceland, so I got some things done in India in the two months I was here. I visited the dentist, the optician, the tailor. When I go home, I'll have a new smile, a new wardrobe, and spectacles.
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I want the government to resign and an emergency government to be proclaimed, preferably made up of women. They can't do worse than men.
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Thanks to the Jolabokaflod, books still matter in Iceland; they get read and talked about. Excitement fills the air. Every reading is crowded; every print run is sold.
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Being a writer in Iceland, you get rewarded all the time: People really do read our books, and they have opinions; they love them, or they hate them. At the average Christmas party, people push politics and the Kardashians aside and discuss literature.
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In Iceland, book lives matter in every sense of that phrase: The shelf-life of the book, the lives in the book, the life of the writer, and the life of the reader.
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Iceland is a rich country, but in the early 21st century, this prosperity got to our heads, and in 2008, it collapsed.
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My three years in Manhattan were sort of my university years. I was learning by myself, and it was a tough time. That's when I began writing articles for newspapers back home about life in New York. This interest took over, and I moved from painting to writing.
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Most early Icelandic paintings are landscapes.
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We have to save ourselves from ourselves. We have to minimize the effect our own politicians can have on our society. We have to get some rules from the outside.
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For us Icelanders, the Sagas are like the Bible, only much better.
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Like many writers, I'm usually more interested in reading about authors than their actual works. We're more curious to know how they were written than what they are like to read.
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