Halldor Laxness, Iceland’s Nobel Prize Winner

Halldór Laxness, a fourteen-year-old farm boy from the countryside community of Mosfellsbær, published his first newspaper article in 1916. Three years later he published his first novel, Child of Nature. Then thirty-six years later, Laxness became the only Icelandic writer to ever receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his vivid epic power which has renewed the great narrative art of Iceland." 

His career spanned seventy-nine years. Many of his twenty-two novels remain in print, which you can find at bookstores throughout Iceland, and indeed all over the world. 

Laxness wrote stories, travelogues and essays, several poetry collections, and eight plays. He began his literary career writing about his explorations of religion and his spiritual search. Baptized in the Catholic church as Halldór Kiljan Laxness, a name which honored the place where he lived and harkened to Saint Killian, he eventually gave up his religion and focused his work primarily around socialist ideas. 

He published his first significant work, The Great Weaver from Kashmir, in 1927, after traveling extensively throughout Europe, and coming under the influence of Upton Sinclair, with whom he later became friends. 

In between his own writing, Laxness published several Icelandic translations of the world's major authors, including Ernest Hemmingway's A Farewell to Arms. 

At the end of World War II, Laxness gained notoriety for his book, The Atom Station. The U.S. had taken over the occupation of Iceland from the British, and made a request to build a permanent military base at Keflavík. Laxness, afraid that Iceland would lose its autonomy and would also become a target for nuclear attack because of the proposed base, wrote his book in opposition to U.S. involvement in Icelandic affairs. Not long afterward, Laxness was blacklisted in the United States. 

His career, however, remained strong throughout the rest of the world, and for the rest of his life. He finished his last work in 1987, with his memoirs. Several of his stories were published after his death in 1998. His books have been translated into 43 languages. 

Gljúfrasteinn, the former home of Halldor Laxness, was opened to the public as a museum in 2004. The house sits on the banks of the river Kaldakvísl, in Mosfellsbær, just a fifteen-minute drive from downtown Reykjavik. Preserved just as it was when Laxness lived and wrote there, the house is open for guided tours, and hosts summer concerts. 

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