Spotlight on Icelandic women writers (and their translators)

Join us on October 10th to celebrate the publication of Open Letter’s 2026 Iceland Triptych—three remarkable Icelandic novels in English translation: Boudoir by Sigrún Pálsdóttir (trans. Lytton Smith), The Strongest Woman in the World by Steinunn G. Helgadóttir (trans. Larissa Kyzer), and Twelve Women & Under the Volcano by Svava Jakobsdóttir (trans. Esja Alyssa Matich). Author Steinunn G. Helgadóttir and translators Larissa Kyzer and Lytton Smith will be in attendance for a reading and discussion about these wildly different works, which read side by side, illuminate the lives and experiences of women in the twentieth and twenty-first century Iceland.

About the Books:

The Strongest Woman in the World:

 Siblings Eiður and Gunnhildur grow up in a household balanced uneasily between emotional volatility and unspoken grief—a home where their parents are never happy at the same time. When tragedy fractures the family, the siblings are separated, their lives diverging in unexpected and quietly extraordinary ways.

Eiður turns to activism, seeking order and justice in a world that rarely offers either. Traveling to Lesbos to lead a group of rebel activists aiding the refugee crisis, he fears that he lacks the passion and empathy necessary to enact true social change. Gunnhildur, who hides a physical strength most would find unimaginable, becomes a mortuary cosmetologist, renowned for her ability to lend peace and dignity to the dead. In her meticulous care for the bodies of others, she finds a way to hold the world still, if only briefly.

These two threads—Gunnhildur’s superhero-like strength and Eiður’s activism—come together at a jail, where Gunnhildur attempts to prove that she really is the strongest woman in the world.

Boudoir:

Teddý lives with her parents on a farm in the Icelandic wilderness. It’s 1962, and the world is changing, although you wouldn’t know it from the stark quiet of the lava fields and mountains that mark the boundaries of the young woman’s existence. But after two chance encounters, Teddý’s dreams of a world beyond begin to crystallise, albeit in strange and unexpected ways, as we follow one woman’s life over five decades, from farm to city to the skies. Taking us from the grandeur of rural Iceland to the glossy, sticky world of 1970s air travel, via check fraud, thwarted ambition and lost astronauts, Boudoir is a novel about reinvention, dislocation, and the forceful gravity of the lives and selves we think we’ve left behind.

About the Authors / Translators:

Sigrún Pálsdóttir is an Icelandic writer and historian. She completed a PhD in the History of Ideas at the University of Oxford in 2001, after which she was a research fellow at the University of Iceland. She was the editor of Saga, the principal peer-reviewed journal for Icelandic history, from 2008 to 2016. Pálsdóttir’s work has been nominated for the Icelandic Literary Prize, the Icelandic Women’s Literature Prize, the Hagþenkir Non-fiction Prize and the DV Culture Prize. Her book Sigrún og Friðgeir (Uncertain Seas) won the Icelandic Booksellers’ Prize in 2013, and her second novel Embroidery (available from Open Letter, as is History. A Mess) was awarded the European Union Prize for Fiction 2021.

Lytton Smith is the author most recently of the chapbook The After (New Michigan Press). A former NEA Literature Translation Fellow, he has translated fifteen books from Icelandic, including Andri Snær Magnason’s work on climate change, Of Time and Water.

Steinunn G. Helgadóttir is a visual artist and well-known Icelandic poet and prose writer. She received The Icelandic Women’s Literature Prize 2016 for her novel Voices From the Radio Operator’s House. Helgadóttir’s work has been exhibited at solo and group art exhibitions around the world. She has also curated numerous art exhibitions in several museums and galleries in Iceland.

Larissa Kyzer is a writer and Icelandic-English literary translator. Her translation work has earned her the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Nadia Christensen Translation Prize, the Icelandic Bookseller Association’s Incentive Award, and a Pushcart nomination. She has also received support from the NEA, the European Union Prize for Literature, Fulbright, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Icelandic Literature Center, Reykjavík UNESCO City of Literature, and Finland’s Kone Foundation. Larissa is on the steering committee of the National Writers Union’s Literary Translators Division, a member of the Icelandic Writers Union, and on the board of the American Literary Translators Association. She splits her time between Brooklyn and Reykjavík.