Steinar Bragi

A Manifesto at the Beginning of a New Millennium

I

One of Zenon’s paradoxes sounds, in short, like this: If you divide the distance between A and B in half, then B can never be reached – the division goes towards infinity – eternity and who has got time for that? In the film IQ – the love story about Einstein’s niece – this distance between A and B is overcome with love: Meg Ryan, an advocate of the scientific approach, approaches Tim Robbins, the smart auto mechanic, one step at a time, quoting said paradox; and as Meg has come up close to him she stops, living progress reflected in their eyes, they purse their lips which meet in a kiss. This is nonsense.
Outside the moon lights up a pale crescent.

II

The world is ruled by probability. By using this word, “probability”, I am not pointing my finger at the wealthy – middle aged, white males who use drugs, objectify the female body and reside in the uppermost layers of western societies, their “souls” dead within – or their power greedy and underhanded pawns – the politicians of western “democracies” – no, because if by “probability” I meant “nár” or “hræ”, as opposed to the meaning that I will present later, a sense closer to the field of statistics; then I would be telling a joke. [The author uses the Icelandic word “líkur”, which means “probability”, but also “nár” or “hræ” (i.e. “a corpse”). Trans.].

Even though one may find it slightly banal, now at the beginning of the 21. century, to speak about the ideological consequences of quantum theory, I am not sure if that is true and I say:

In the world of quantum physics, the world of ordinary perception is absent. Everything that happens in this quantum world is based on probability – statistics. A radioactive atom could, for instance, degenerate and emit an electron; on the other hand, it might not.

But then we are faced with the following problem: Let us say that the writer Einar Már Guðmundsson would be sitting by a desk inside a closed metal container. Next to one hand he has a pen with radioactive ink, and next to the other hand he has white paper. It so happens that there is an exactly 50 percent probability that the radioactive ink will degenerate, emit an electron and cause an electric sensor in the paper to send a signal to a hook above the paper which releases a cover, thereby enabling Einar to publish a book next Christmas.

In the world of the everyday we would say that there is a 50 percent probability that the book will become a reality and without having to look we can say, gleefully, that either the book will be published or it will not be published. According to quantum theory however, neither possibility is real until it has been seen: Einar neither has writer’s block nor has the book been bound and ready to be published until we have looked inside the container and seen what happened.

In the film IQ – the love story about Einstein’s niece – Einstein objected to these implications of quantum theory when he said: “God does not throw dice”. A few decades after Einstein said this, it was the summer of 1982 – the year Meg Ryan acted in her first TV commercial  – Paul Dirac, a French scientific genius, organized an experiment which confirmed the truthfulness of quantum theory. Ergo: Nothing is real except what can be seen.

Outside the moon throws pale dice.

III

In his book, How to Travel With a Salmon, and for some reason I am made to think of a pale salmon, Umberto Eco – in the preface to the chapter “On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1” – refers to the book Historia universal de la infamia “Etcetera” by Jorge Luis Borges in which Borges refers to Viajesde Varonas Prudentes and his book Suárez Miranda, and he, Eco, then proceeds to place a limit on the realm that humans have claimed to have mapped with some precision, or rather, he points out the limitations of what can be represented: a map on a scale of 1 to 1 which is laid over the world will with its existence change the world itself it was meant to reflect and so it requires another map, depicting its relationship to the world and so on and on, and so it falls prey to Aristotle’s “Third Man Argument”, as Eco points out.

IV

As the reader no doubt has noticed, I have not yet managed to quote Kundera – The Art of the Novel is a classic – but Borges is here all the same – and he speaks of having a message for the world, having something on your chest.

V

“ – Do not speak to me about democracy “, an acquaintance of mine, whom I met as I was walking along the street Ægisíða, said to me (I was speaking about democracy), “Instead say Mammonesque oligarchy of rich men moronic-ness hiding their activities behind a parliamentary democracy of drunkards, the representatives of the public do not exist in modern democracy, politicians are just puppets for the fascist big companies of those who own the money in the name of freedom and vote with your free will on what has been decided for you a long time ago, it does not matter. Live the revolution! Up with the strong leader of the wonderful leftist-humanist middle class. But this, of course, is a joke. And yes, then there was the joke about the man on incapacity benefits – does it not mean that incapacity has its benefits – and then there is the other big idea that SS – Sláturfélag Suðurlands (E. The Southern Icelandic Sausage Company), which is a sausage manufacturer, get it – had something to with the Nazis! To think about that – Then we stir one more ólafur one more hallgrímur one more thór one more pose into the cocktail party and just wait excitingly for all this news of the Lifting of the Glass, shattering of the Classes, Picking of the Tooth, Salmoning of the Hors d’Oeuvre, Nodding of the Heads, Pouring of the Down, the Slender Sticks of Glasses which is a sequel to the pick of the tooth which again is independent –an independent sequel to the eating of the hors d’oeuvre, of course, but let’s throw in one showdown right or rhight towards the end or Author of half measures, hand-wringing and precisely not the asshole of anything, i.e. The Showing of the Down.

Literary discourse if dead! Architecture is the future! Up with houses!”

VI

If we look at how man has multiplied on earth and societies have been built, it is clear that efficiency is a central idea – in buildings, government, commerce, transport and indeed everything that falls under work – and hence, as years have passed, the concentration of power into cities which become the brain of the society, but nerves run out of there and along the countryside, to smaller towns. Following this movement towards more concentration of power from an efficiency point of view, at the same time the tendency has been towards the power being more and more distant from what it is meant to reflect – a distance between politicians and their constituents.

The greater the number of people a politician is meant to reflect, the more far-fetched and generalized his election to the post becomes; the greater number of voters that need to be won over in an election campaign, the more money a candidate needs. In the eyes of moneyed entities, businesses or individuals, it would not be practical to have paid high sums into the election funds of a candidate or a political party without getting something in return and in order for this arrangement to appear democratic, as in the opposite of unfair, and be according to the will of those who elected this particular candidate, one has to assume that the interests of that big company go together with the interests of the votes.

This is the différance of democracy as it is today; the general voter – average salary, middle class – the public – elects a certain representation of a candidate in an election campaign – he appeals to me, he best reflects my emphasises and interests. The candidate is again a generally worded presentation – like “God”, “Love” and “Nation”, the glue of the “multicultural society” of the United States – powerful groups with more precise needs that are again based ideologically in the root of all discourse, the paradox, and it is from there that the aforementioned différance gets its justification – from those ideas about the individual, freedom and democracy.

The goal of all, companies and individuals, is to increase their wealth; the company which supports a candidate in return for him paying for the favour with a clearly defined and quantifiable fulfilment, aims to increase its wealth this way – to somehow make sure that conditions in the company’s finances become such that they increase the company’s profit; “profit” means the cash value of the product – of the material kind, sugar, tobacco or films, e.g. – that is produced can never be more than the price of that product, the company makes a profit but the public – or the consumer units who use the product – therefore gets less; the paradox is then that this notion of one’s profit over the other does not at the same time stand for – from the point of view of prevailing libertarianism – injustice, rather the opposite: efficiency – and subsequently for justice – since one’s profit over the other causes in the end both to benefit more and democracy wins – this is in other words the most efficient arrangement of all arrangements and therefore it is not undemocratic that a small group of people can with their money be more directly involved in power than those of lesser wealth.

Notwithstanding whether this could possibly be true – that A profits more than B, ergo: A and B profit more – the bottom line is that the more money you have, the more precise your control over power can be.

VII

While power in the democratic states of the West has undergone a certain concentration or streamlining; buildings – those material shells of the power – have moved further away from the earth, the ground floor, and are built on efficiency increasingly higher towards the sky and therefore moved further away from that which is the foundation of their existence: “the public” or “the common”.

The more general an individual’s view inside the big city is – the more overview he has – the more general can his presentation be and the more specifically can he define the framework of the prevailing discourse or the “spirit of the times” – the frame around the window one looks out of or the water that the average fish swims in.

This power – and the overview which feeds the power, as soon as it starts to be defined by it – is realized in the skyscraper, this boxy and reflecting monument to efficiency. As long as the average citizen lives and breathes inside his narrow reality down on the ground – without an overview he walks the canyons anxiously squinting upwards towards airplanes and skyscrapers – the elevated, almost unearthly power “by god’s grace” behind their glass, secure in the privilege of seeing without being seen. The overview which comes with the power of this godly efficiency finds, on the other hand, its opposite in the chaotic stream of those who walk the streets below: life “down under” is marked by inertia, lack of understanding and fragmentation, individuals outside of all context – the specific without the general.

This area, this height, is today the playing field of the man of religion, the artist and the academic and their power is in a certain sense lost – that is incapable of shaping the “spirit of the times”. The artist can, however, in an eliot-ian sense, become an impetus of sorts, who brings together, finds the common denominator and manages – at best – to “publish” the spirit of the times with their insights; but it is a passive task – the initiative, the real making of the world lies elsewhere. And then comes the revelation: the artist is following-a-few-steps-behind, obedient and humble in search for his “denominator"; the entrepreneur, on the other hand, is the seer of modern times – he is the other. After the accumulation of wealth in the cities and their inhabitants took a big leap with the revolution, that is the industrial revolution, the power moved away from the king, the aristocracy, churches and their spokesmen – the clergy, the educated classes and artists – towards the self-aggrandized bourgeois entrepreneur with his accompanying emphasis on efficiency, the spokesmen became the mass media and the media people or journalists who are neither artists nor educated, but a little bit of both in a way which is more general than either of those two classes can take credit for, and the cathedrals became skyscrapers.

And then it is the concept “poet entrepreneur” in which all this is encapsulated. The poet entrepreneur is a modern day superman; he encompasses opposites in the world, encompasses all that which is strictly speaking considered to be incompatible and paradoxical; but generally speaking – that is in general terms – is not: from the specific in the canyons of the big cities he reaches upwards to the general, he elevates himself up to the top floor of the skyscraper from where he controls the general terms of presentation of what the specificity-plagued ground floor “lacks” – in the entertainment of more complete dreams with a softer edge, for instance “love” with a beginning, a middle and an end, and in politics the fulfilled hopes for a better future in the presentation of the party or in the person of the politician. Thus the poet entrepreneur, the most spiritual person of all, guides a general lack towards the specific and thus maintains the need (in the tension of the incompatible) for constant fulfilment in a way that is convenient for the poet entrepreneur specifically, defined and quantifiably; this way the solution is also the root of the problem and, as paradoxical as that sounds, it makes for the same reason sense and could never be different for the simple reason that “the spirit” in “the spirit of the times” is the paradox itself – differently conceptualised at different times – and those who give themselves over to it, free from the limitations of an ideological position, that is limitation and conservativeness; become great and shining, like bloated yellow suns, wombed with meaning.

VIII

When writing about literature and such, whether in a general or a more closely defined academic context, it sometimes happens that a critic bites off more than he can chew, presents statements which arrogantly claim to be far-reaching, encompassing, if not “Literature” as a whole, then “The Novel”, “The Poet” or “Reality” but never manage to become anything more than a kind of literary manifesto about the personal ailments of the critic in question. That is something that I plan to avoid; I have resolved to limit myself to the following statement:

to restrict the viewpoint of a third person narrative in a text – for instance to be clear on the tension between “the person”, “the narrator”, “the author” and then, subsequently, Blanchot’s writings about the same, that is the impersonal third person – and give it certain qualities, or a centre, obeys the same laws as the same kind of postponement of destination and Zenon’s paradox of motion, Einar’s problem of publication or not-publication, the constant postponement of an all-encompassing realisation of being – of meaning – as it is visualized in Eco’s, Borges’ and Prudentes’ “map”, – and if “text” is to be understood in the modern sense as “all that is”, that is the postponement of differences; and Form, the object of Aristotelian critique, is understood both in a platonic and a slightly but not much broader literary sense, I think it possible, be it not logistically necessary, to make it easier for literary types – the readers of the new millennium – to tie the “man” in “the third man argument” in with “the person” in “the text” above and the third man argument becomes: “the third person argument” – even “the first, second and third person argument” – a brand new idea – and accepted as a sufficient premise for the creation of a literary manifesto about the place of literature in a new millennium – to the extent that this will be read.

Steinar Bragi, 2003.

Translated by Vera Júlíusdóttir.

Screaming Into Eternity: On Steinar Bragi’s Poetry

1

In his first poetry book, Svarthol (Black Hole), Steinar Bragi frequently criticises media culture and the distorted picture it gives us of life. However, the poems in this book could hardly be called protest poems, at least not in the traditional sense. Yet the dominant mood could be described as pessimism towards contemporary life, for instance reflected in the apocalyptic themes which I will come to later. Svarthol, admittedly, distinguishes itself from Steinar Bragi’s other two poetry books, as it’s tone is lighter, and one can discern the influence of authors like Einar Már Guðmundsson and Andri Snær Magnason. There is also a certain humour, and poems which appear traditional often bring a surprise a twist in the tail.

tvær manneskjur
með dreymin augu
hönd í hönd
á sjávarhömrum
Andspænis blásilfruðu ólgandi hafi
Hugsandi um fótanuddtæki

[two people
with dreamy eyes
hand in hand
on a sea cliff
Facing a blue-silvery raging ocean
Thinking about foot massagers]

(“Hlekkir” (Chains) from Svarthol (Black Hole, 1998))

Steinar’s two latter books, Augnkúluvökvi (Eyeball Liquid) and Ljúgðu Gosi, ljúgðu (Lie Pinocchio, Lie) are of a very different nature. In these books, the author has developed a signature style, with a rhythm that counteracts the paragraph breaks, and using no punctuation marks to divide the text up into sentences. This chaotic approach to form is a reflection of the subject matter which includes the disintegration and decay of the body; the breakdown of time and of seasons; the lack of meaning in language; and notions of sex, faith, darkness and death. This entails a dissolution of the frame in more than one sense. The dense imagery creates a great sense of movement in the poems, and they are always on the verge of bursting out of their form. Many of the themes which appear in Steinar Bragi’s poems are also reflected in his novels.

2

Stundum á daginn svitna ég eins og í bjartsýniskasti
þegar sólin skín inn um gluggann og á kvöldin
þegar kólnar þéttist raki á veggjunum sem gljá þegar
sólin rís yfir fjallið upp úr miðnætti það er sumar
og nætur í reykjavík íslandi eru bjartar
og hljóðar það gljáir og vakir eins og dinglað í streng
í gluggunum um nætur horfandi stjarft
í grenjandi birtu á fólkið í hinum gluggunum í
herberginu við hliðina hengdi sig maður í gardínu ég
heyrði þegar small í hálsinum eða
stöng hrundi yfir andvaka mann í limbói

[sometimes in the day I sweat as if in a bout of optimism
when the sun shines in through the window and in the evening
when it gets cooler moisture condenses on the walls which shine when
a sun rises over the mountain just after midnight it is summer
and nights in reykjavík iceland are light
and quiet it shines and stays awake like dangling from a cord
in the windows at night watching frozen
in a screaming light the people in the other windows in
the room next to me a man hanged himself from a window curtain I
heard when his neck snapped or
a pole crashed over an insomniac in limbo]

(“limbóið” (the limbo) from Ljúgðu Gosi, ljúgðu (2001))

In 2000 Turninn (The Tower), Steinar Bragi’s first novel came out, aptly for that millennium year, for this novel describes the fall and the resurrection of the world and the evolution of man from a mythical perspective. Turninn is in many aspects quite a departure from Steinar Bragi’s other works, as he uses a very different narrative method and style, and approaches the material somewhat differently. What Turninn has in common with his other works, however, is that the end of the world theme is still at its heart.

The story begins in fact before the beginning of the world, in some unspecific time, before the history of evolution begins. In this world a small tower starts to grow in the middle of the jungle which covers the earth. The sky explodes and the world burns to the ground except for the tower which continues to rise further from its clearing, thanks to the tears of the last turtle. Inside the tower there live a little girl and a little boy. The tower grows and grows and the children see the world outside change and evolve. By creating a language to interpret this world they make it into their own, although they are unable to physically engage with it. They become conscious of their movements through the world and through history, and they call this consciousness God. The higher the tower goes, the more distance is created and the broader their horizon becomes. This makes their vocabulary larger, but at the same time dreams lose their magic, the words swallow their dreams.

Outside the tower, mankind evolves and large cities spring up around it. The tower now stretches so high that it has become invisible, except to a man who contemplates getting closer to God through suicide. Thus the idea of God has grown distant from mankind, the divine world is another world and the road between these two worlds can in some ways be accessed through suicide. To pass from one world to another, man has to take a conscious leap into the void.
At the end of the story there is another disruption, the sky splits apart and all life is destroyed, except of course the tower, which as before lays the foundation for a new world. In Steinar Bragi’s lates novel, Sólskinsfólkið (The Sunshine People) he also explores the gap between two worlds, partly using the premise of suicide again like in Turninn, albeit in quite a different fashion. One could say that the main characters test the possibilities of suicide in order to pass from one fictional world to another.

In Sólskinsfólkið we are introduced to the character Ari, who has just returned to Iceland after having lived abroad for many years. Ari is really a foreigner in Iceland. Much has changed there and he has trouble adjusting to his new environment. He teaches philosophy at the University of Iceland where he gets to know one of his students fairly well, but that is pretty much the extent of his engagement with other people, until he meets Heiða, but that is another story which takes place in another world. Heiða works in a costume rental, and is a kind of an eternal student who parties hard. Her husband, who she has separated from, lies in a coma in a hospital, and she considers his condition to be in some way her fault. Ari and Heiða will then meet after they have each said goodbye to the world in some sense. When they meet they are alone in the world like Palle in Jens Sigsgaard’s much-loved children’s book, alone in a strange Reykjavík where odd things start to happen and the fantasy-elements in the story take over.

The reader does not get to know exactly how this transfer from one world to another comes about, but one interpretation could be that Ari and Heiða have both committed some kind of a suicide. At one point in the story Ari drives to Rauðhólar [Red Hills, a beauty spot near Reykjavik – Transl.] and the reader leaves him there: “He squinted and walked between the hills, the sun was strong and the sand around him glowed and was bright red and Ari felt the redness engulf him” (p. 102). Earlier in the book we have found out that Ari has read in a paper that Rauðhólar is a popular suicide spot. The next time the reader encounters Ari he finds himself in another world. He is in Reykjavík but there is no one there, the city is empty of people. He is alone in the world until he meets Heiða. Heiða had discovered that the rubbish chute in her house seems not to have a fixed end point. In search for meaning she decides to dive down the chute, out into the unknown. She lands in an empty Reykjavik, not remembering exactly how she got there. This parallel reality is not just empty, there is also something happening to it, it is rotting: “They...looked across the ocean which was a thick, dark green mud filled with some kind of rubbish and the smell was a smell of rot and dirt” (p. 155). The smell is suffocating and the ocean is teeming with rats. Strange sea creatures step ashore from the decaying ocean and Ari and Heiða have to defend themselves against them. A similar idea appears in the poem “Þangmenn” (“Seaweed Men”) from the book of poems Ljúgðu Gosi, ljúgðu (2001): “a snow-less winter night and the white all under the lids and the dark/gapes like a mean half-wit over the living and then plucks/its feet and its hands off and it squeezes itself to sleep and/pretends to sleep while seaweed men lower themselves on ropes down from/ the stars and bob near the shore when the day breaks/washes the first ones ashore” (an excerpt from the poem). A new world is followed by an unbearable lack of understanding. The ending of the book is ambiguous, but it is difficult not to read from it that they both choose to leave the world again, as all signs indicate that the end of the world is nigh. The sky does not explode like in Turninn, this world falls prey to rot.

In the novel Áhyggjudúkkur (Worry Dolls) from 2002 the mood is also apocalyptic, and nightmarishly so, but it is expressed in a very different way. Like Sólskinsfólkið, Áhyggjudúkkur is set in Reykjavík and the city also plays a central role in this novel. The viewpoint, however, is considerably narrower, as the story is set in the “Mál og menning” bookstore in the downtown street Laugavegur and surrounding buildings. The book follows many characters, most of whom are randomly connected one stormy night shortly before Christmas. The reader wanders between these people’s thoughts, dwells briefly inside the heads of each of them, thus the picture of the person is processed from within. Some of the characters are based on real people, both named and unnamed. Over this familiar setting looms some ill-defined sense of unease which is magnified by a storm which affects the characters’ fates. The story setting gradually fills up with ravens which are harbingers of death:

Á þakinu var svört fuglabreiða sem teygði sig eftir endilöngu þakinu.
Fuglarnir stóðu hreyfingarlausir, horfðu tómlega fram fyrir sig eins og þeir væru að bíða eftir einhverju og þegar flauturnar í lyftustokknum ofan við höfuðið á Evu byrjuðu að væla opnuðust holur inn í höfuðið á henni, fuglarnir lyftu sér til flugs og byrjuðu að hnita hringi, stöðugt víðari hringi eins og þykknandi ský yfir þaki byggingarinnar og ofan af öllum hæstu stöðum borgarinnar vældu sírenurnar út yfir borgina og skömmu síðar varð allt svart (p. 225).

[A black blanket of birds spread over the entire roof.
The birds stood motionless, gazed emptily ahead, as if they were waiting for something and when the alarm bells in the lift shaft above Eva’s head started to ring, holes opened up into her head, the birds took off and began to circle around, in ever widening circles like a thickening cloud over the roof of the building and from all the highest points in the city sirens wailed out over the city and shortly afterwards everything became black]

This is how Áhyggjudúkkur ends. Eva is a young journalist who has spent the night with the hotel employer Níels, who knocked on her door earlier that night on the false pretence of needing to do an electricity reading. They hear strange banging sounds and discover that there are ravens in the corridor, some dead, some wounded and some alive. They slowly make their way up the staircase, it turns out that Eva has never visited the upper floors of the house, and on the way they find Eva’s neighbour dead. The door to the roof is open and Eva steps outside.

It is interesting to compare this ending to the last thing which is said about Heiða in Sólskinsfólkið, when she is up in the Hallgrímskirkja church tower:

Himininn fyrir ofan hana var blár. Hún stakk höfðinu út úr turnhúsinu og horfði upp í himininn og svo fór að dimma. Borgin varð dimm og hvarf og í kirkjunni fyrir neðan hana varð dimmt. Stjörnurnar birtust og lýstu upp himininn. Hún leitaði að stjörnunni sem hann gaf henni og bar nafnið hennar en fann hana ekki (p. 185).

[The sky above her was blue. She stuck her head out from the tower and looked up into the sky and then it started to get dark. The city got dark and disappeared and the church beneath her became dark. The stars came out and lit up the sky. She sought the star which he gave her which had her name but could not find it]

Again we encounter here the theme of taking a leap into eternity which Steinar Bragi uses so often.

In both cases the city vanishes into the darkness of eternity, a layered eternity which takes on many forms. Existence is layered and each world reflects another one.

3

The ability of fiction to form an illusion is a prominent feature of Steinar Bragi’s works. Sólskinsfólkið starts with a scream. A scream which cuts through the ambiguous and strange reality of the book. A scream which forces itself in between the layers of the world and dispels the illusion of fiction. As previously mentioned, Sólskinsfólkið is divided into two parts, the first part is based on some idea of a Reykjavik-like reality but the second part is a fantasy. In the first part of the book the city becomes both tangible and bizarre, both familiar and strange. This idea is vaguely reminiscent of Bragi Ólafsson’s novels, as he often walks this precipice between familiarity and strangeness. The same idea can be found in Áhyggjudúkkur, but the world portrayed there is well defined and easily recognizable. At the same time it is a new side of the Reykjavik we know, a kind of a parallel reality. The Mál og menning bookstore in Laugavegur is indeed a great maze which holds many surprises, and in this story it appears to be a shell around some kind of a world beyond this one which we literally glimpse behind the book shelves. A character in the story discovers that behind the bookcases is an undefined, illuminated vacuum for which no explanation can be found in the reality of the work. Thus the Mál og menning bookstore and its surroundings become a constructed theatre, set for the author’s production of the degenerate and worn-out city life, and it is clear that the performance is about to finish.

Áhyggjudúkkur provide a glimpse into another world, but as mentioned before, that idea is taken much further in Sólskinsfólkið. There, fantasy rules in a world empty of people, and the void and the rot gradually take over the city and the story. The world is in a state of permanent disintegration, the idea of a logical development is constantly being eroded by emptiness, gaps and absences. This is a world of shadows without objects (for such an analysis of fantasy, see for example Fantasy: The Art of Subversion by Rosemary Jackson). The wrestling with form is reflected in this struggle between different worlds. That struggle is one of the defining characteristics of Steinar Bragi’s works and one cannot help but suspect that the wrestling match is nowhere near finished.

© Þorgerður E. Sigurðardóttir, 2004.

Translated by Vera Júlíusdóttir

Nominations

2016 - The Icelandic Literature Prize: Allt fer (Everything Goes)

2014 – The DV Cultural Prize for Literature: Kata

2008 – The DV Cultural Prize for Literature: Konur (Women)

2007 – The Drop of Blood, the Icelandic Crime Writer´s Award: Hið stórfenglega leyndarmál Heimsins (The Magnificent Secret of the World)