Jón Kalman Stefánsson

Jón Kalman Stefánsson is one of the most important contemporary Icelandic writers of world literary stature. Born in Reykjavík in 1963, he has worked as a bricklayer, a butcher, a fish processor, a summer as a policeman at Keflavík airport, and later became a high school literature teacher and librarian. His writing career began with poetry, his first volume was published in 1988, and he began publishing novels in the 1990s, which have brought him international success. In 2005 he won the Icelandic Literary Prize for Summer Light, then Night Falls, and in 2011 he was awarded the Per Olov Enquist Literary Prize. In 2017, his novel The Fish Have No Feet was shortlisted for the International Man Booker Prize and in 2022 he won the French Prix du livre étranger for the best foreign language book of the year.
In the autumn of 2024, two of his titles will be published in Hungarian: his latest novel, The Yellow Submarine, translated by Bence Patat, by Jelenkor Publishers, and his Poems, a cross-section of his lyrical oeuvre, translated by Veronika Egyed, by Typotex Publishers, with the author's self-deprecating afterword, Why waste paper?