Halldór Laxness

Halldór Laxness was born Halldór Guðjónsson in Reykjavík in 1902 and grew up from the age of three at Laxnes, a farm in the Mosfellssveit district outside the capital. His grandmother filled his childhood with old songs and stories, and he began to write early; his first novel appeared when he was seventeen. Restless and curious, he travelled widely in Europe in his youth, stayed at a Benedictine abbey in Luxembourg, and in 1923 was received into the Catholic Church, taking the name of his childhood farm as his surname.

A stay in America in the late 1920s, where he tried to write for Hollywood, turned him toward socialism, and the great novels of the following decades bring that conviction into a style rooted in the laconic manner of the medieval sagas. Salka Valka follows a girl in a fishing village; Independent People, often regarded as his masterpiece, tells of a sheep farmer whose fierce pursuit of independence costs him almost everything; World Light traces the life of a poor folk poet; Iceland’s Bell revisits the country’s subjection to Danish rule. The Atom Station satirised the postwar American military presence on the island. Irony and compassion are held in balance throughout.

In the 1930s Laxness wrote admiringly of the Soviet Union, a position he later regretted, growing disenchanted after 1956. The Nobel Prize of 1955 made him the first, and so far only, Icelandic laureate. He continued to experiment, from the saga parody Gerpla to the wry Under the Glacier, and lived for decades at Gljúfrasteinn, his home near Laxnes, now a museum. He died in 1998.