New York City’s Sant Jordi Online Literary Festival will feature five Icelandic authors in readings, book chats, and performances this weekend. The festival, running from April 23-25, decided to move its programming online when COVID-19 shut down New York City.
The Sant Jordi NYC Online Literary Festival is dedicated to literature in translation. In addition to celebrating literature from Iceland, the festival will also include work translated from Arabic, Catalan, Danish, French, Galician, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Urdu.
Author, actor, and stand-up comic Bergur Ebbi will headline Iceland Night on Thursday, April 23 with a live reading and performance based on his new book Screenshot. The book is an entertaining look at technology, fake news, artificial intelligence, and what we can learn about and from our digital existence in the time of COVID-19.
Iceland Night will also feature a dynamic performance by Elías Knörr, a Galician poet living in Reykjavík who writes in both his native Galician as well as Icelandic. Author and poet Fríða Ísberg will chat with translator Larissa Kyzer about imposter syndrome, the Imposter Poets, the all-female poetry collective of which Fríða is a member, and her debut short story collection, Kláði (‘Itch’), which was nominated for the 2020 Nordic Council Literature Prize.
Kári Tulinius is an Icelandic novelist and poet who splits his time between Reykjavík, Iceland and Helsinki, Finland. His bilingual reading includes work from his most recent collection, Jökulhvörf, (‘Glacier Line’). Visual artist, poet, and novelist Steinunn G. Helgadóttir and translator Larissa Kyzer will give a reading from Steinunn’s latest novel, Sterkasta kona í heimi (‘The Strongest Woman in the World’). The reading will interweave the original Icelandic text with the English translation.
Readers can visit the festival website for more information.
