Hallgrimur Helgason

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. ”

Nabokov can be almost too delicate at times, but in 'Lolita,' he puts his aristocratic sensitivity to use in such a dark tale that it creates this great tension between the story being told and the style that it's written in. And it's just amazing that one of the best novels in English was written by a Russian. ”

I'm the kind of writer who thinks style is just as important as the story being told. ”

For us Icelanders, the Sagas are like the Bible, only much better. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”