An Interview with Yrsa Sigurðardóttir by John Tucker

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In her responses to the interview questions, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir emerges as a writer keenly aware of her audience and the traditions to which she belongs, but governed by her own priorities and concerns, a long-standing delight in stories of mystery. Her novels, as she says, can be divided into crime novels and novels of suspense. But they are all marked by a taste for the chilling, a characteristic but not a defining feature of Nordic Noir. Iceland is important to her, providing a familiar but unusual geography. Her characters too are real people, but in the Icelandic way unusually interconnected and marked by a shared culture and a shared history. Though she has succeeded in creating a successful heroine in Þóra, “a very typical Icelandic woman,” she has chosen to set her aside for the moment in order to explore new avenues in her most recent books. As her answers make clear, she is a serious writer committed to exploring new narrative challenges.