THE 2026 ICELANDIC TRANSLATOR TRIPTYCH

About this event

Join us for a celebration of Icelandic literature in translation on October 6 with authors Steinunn G. Helgadóttir and Sigrún Pálsdóttir, in conversation with translator Larissa Kyzer! Now out from Open Letter, the 2026 Translator Triptych (Iceland) features three novels—including Steinunn G. Helgadóttir’s The Strongest Woman in the World and Sigrún Pálsdóttir’s Boudoir—that have been acclaimed since their publication in Icelandic, and are now available in English translation. In Steinunn G. Helgadóttir’s The Strongest Woman in the World, in translation by Larissa Kyzer, 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. In Sigrún Pálsdóttir’s Boudoir, translated by Lytton Smith, 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…

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