The Ministry of Education and Culture’s annual Artist Salary allocations were announced on Friday. RÚV reports that 236 artists across six disciplines were awarded salaries for periods of two to twelve months. This represents but a fraction of the 1,083 applications—from 972 individuals and 111 performing arts groups—that were received.
See Also: Icelandic Government Raises Artist Salaries
Salaries are awarded for periods of two to twelve months. At the beginning of the year, Minister of Tourism, Trade, and Culture Lilja Alfreðsdóttir announced that funding of artists salaries would increase with individual monthly stipends being raised to ISK 428,000 [$3,330, €2,908] per month during 2022. In the coming year, the monthly stipend will increase to ISK 507,500 [$3,551; €3,354].
Both well-known and emerging artists are among those awarded salaries this year. Those who received a full year’s salary include (but are not limited to) designer Hanna Dís Whitehead, visual artists Anna Rún Tryggvadóttir and Sæmundur Þór Helgason, actor Arnar Jónsson, saxophonist Óskar Guðjónsson, and composer Viktor Orri Árnason.
Writers’ salaries
Allocations for writers’ salaries are always a hot topic of debate and conversation, not least because this discipline has the most allocations. This year, a total of 555 months’ salaries were allocated to writers. (The next largest number of allocations, or 435 months total, was made to visual artists; a total of 50 months were allocated to designers, 190 months were allocated to both theatrical performers and composers, and 180 to musicians.)
A full year’s salary was allocated to twelve authors, many of whom are available to English-language readers: Auður Jónsdóttir (author of Quake, trans. Meg Matich); Gerður Kristný (author of Bloodhoof and Drápa, both translated by Rory McTurk); Guðrún Eva Mínervudóttir (The Creator; trans. Sarah Bowen); Hallgrímur Helgason (Woman at 1000 Degrees; trans. Brian FitzGibbon; A Hitman’s Guide to Housecleaning); Jón Kalman Stefánsson (Heaven and Hell; Summer Light and Then Comes Night, both translated by Philip Roughton); Kristín Ómarsdóttir (Swanfolk, trans. Vala Thorodds; Children in Reindeer Woods trans. Lytton Smith); and Steinar Bragi (The Ice Lands, Trans. Lorenza García; The Haunting of Reykjavík).
Other authors familiar to English-language readers also received funding for the coming year. Andri Snær Magnason (On Time and Water, trans. Lytton Smith), Bragi Ólafsson (The Ambassador, trans. Lytton Smith), Einar Már Guðmundsson (Angels of the Universe, trans. Bernard Scudder), Kristín Eiríksdóttir (A Fist or a Heart, trans. Larissa Kyzer); and Oddný Eir (Land of Love and Ruins, trans. Philip Roughton) were all among those receiving nine-month salaries.
