Hallgrimur Helgason
The facts available do not identify a single titled work for Hallgrímur Helgason, which makes the prescribed opening impossible to fulfill without inventing something. The biography below opens instead on the most concretely defining available fact.
Hallgrímur Helgason is a writer, painter, playwright, screenwriter, and caricaturist who works in both Icelandic and English. That combination of literary and visual practices sets him apart: he is an artist in the most literal sense, moving between the written page, the stage, the screen, and the canvas without settling into any single discipline.
He was born on February 18, 1959, in Reykjavík, Iceland, and is a citizen of Iceland. His formal education took him to the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, a training that sits at the foundation of a career spanning writing, drama, screenwriting, and visual art. He works in both Icelandic and English, which gives his output a reach beyond the Icelandic-speaking world.
His writing has earned him the Icelandic Literary Prize. The facts available do not name a specific successor or collaborator, so the biography closes on that concrete detail: the Icelandic Literary Prize, awarded to a writer who came to his career through the doors of a fine arts academy in Munich.
Quotes by Hallgrimur Helgason
Writing in English made me become a foreigner in my own country. It helped me create the necessary distance to my homeland.
In the Nordic countries, there are hardly any societal problems, but we writers are bloodthirsty people like anyone else, so we have to quench this thirst with literature. If you live in a mafia state with lots of violence on the streets, you tend to write beautiful poetry.
As a writer, you have to be mean and vicious. Use the pen as your gun. Sometimes the people you write about get hurt.
I'm the kind of writer who thinks style is just as important as the story being told.
Like many writers, I'm usually more interested in reading about authors than their actual works. We're more curious to know how they were written than what they are like to read.
We have to save ourselves from ourselves. We have to minimize the effect our own politicians can have on our society. We have to get some rules from the outside.
My three years in Manhattan were sort of my university years. I was learning by myself, and it was a tough time. That's when I began writing articles for newspapers back home about life in New York. This interest took over, and I moved from painting to writing.