Halldór Laxness

Born Halldór Guðjónsson on April 23, 1902, in Reykjavík, Iceland, he was raised from the age of three on the farm of Laxnes in the Mosfellssveit parish, a landscape of volcanic rock and sheep pasture that formed his imagination. His grandmother sang him ancient sagas before he could talk and told him stories from heathen times, and he published his first novel, Child of Nature, at seventeen. Restless and intellectually voracious, he spent his twenties wandering, through Scandinavia, Germany, Austria, France, England, Italy, and even a Benedictine monastery in Luxembourg, where in 1923 he was baptized into the Catholic Church, adopting the surname Laxness and the middle name Kiljan, after the Irish martyr Saint Killian. He later abandoned Catholicism for socialism, traveled to the Soviet Union, and spent time in the United States. The Great Weaver from Kashmir (1927), a modernist novel of spiritual crisis, announced his ambition. But it was the sequence of novels written in the 1930s and 1940s that made him Iceland's greatest modern writer: Salka Valka (1931–1932), about the struggles of a fishing village; Independent People (1934–1935), the story of an impoverished sheep farmer's fierce and ruinous self-reliance; World Light (1937–1940), a four-volume portrait of a peasant poet; and the nationalistic trilogy Iceland's Bell (1943–1946). These novels criticized Icelandic society from a socialist perspective and provoked enormous controversy. In 1955 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature for having "renewed the great narrative art of Iceland." Later works, The Fish Can Sing (1957), Paradise Reclaimed (1960), grew more lyrical and introspective. He died on February 8, 1998, at his home at Gljúfrasteinn in Mosfellsbær, at ninety-five.