Arnaldur Indriðason

Arnaldur Indriðason was born in Reykjavík on 28 January 1961, the son of Þórunn Ólöf Friðriksdóttir and the novelist Indriði G. Þorsteinsson, whose first novel, 79 af stöðinni, was made into a film the year after his son was born. In Iceland he is known simply as Arnaldur, since Indriðason is a patronymic rather than a surname. He finished at Menntaskólinn við Hamrahlíð in 1981 and went to work at the daily Morgunblaðið, first as a journalist and then, from 1986 to 2001, as its film critic. Alongside the reviewing he took a degree in history at the University of Iceland in 1996, writing his dissertation on Icelandic film. His first novel, Synir duftsins, appeared in 1997 and introduced the Reykjavík detective Erlendur Sveinsson. A thriller, Napóleonsskjölin, followed in 1999, and in 2000 Mýrin, the third Erlendur book, made his name: the murder of an old man in the Norðurmýri district that leads into the country's genetic records, widely read as a critique of the gene-gathering company deCODE genetics. It won the Glass Key for the best Nordic crime novel in 2002, and Grafarþögn won it in 2003, the first time a writer had taken the prize two years running. In Bernard Scudder's translation, as Silence of the Grave, that book won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger in 2005. Baltasar Kormákur filmed Mýrin as Jar City in 2006 from a screenplay the two wrote together, and it took the Crystal Globe at Karlovy Vary the following year. The Erlendur series ran to fourteen novels by 2010, and was followed by books of the detective's youth, by the wartime investigators Flóvent and Thorson, and by the retired policeman Konráð. For more than two decades a new Arnaldur novel appeared every 1 November, ahead of the Christmas book flood, and his books have sold more than twenty million copies in some forty languages. In 2021 he received the Jónas Hallgrímsson Prize for service to the Icelandic language. He lives in Reykjavík with his wife and three children.

On Icelandic Language Day in 2021, the prize named for the national poet Jónas Hallgrímsson went to a crime novelist. In a country that had long dismissed crime stories as poor literature, Arnaldur said he accepted it on behalf of all Iceland's crime writers, as recognition of the genre he had represented for some twenty-five years.