The young adult novel Sölvasaga unglings (The Story of the Teen Sölvi) by Icelandic author Arnar Már Arngrímsson, won the Nordic Council’s Children and Young People’s Literature Prize in Copenhagen yesterday, RÚV reports.
The work is a realistic novel about Sölvi, the teen, who moves from the city to the countryside to spend the summer with his grandmother. He has difficulty connecting with others and finds refuge in the world of social media. His interest in words allows him to find a channel for expressing himself through rap music.
The book is Arnar Már’s first work of fiction. He is a teacher at Akureyri High School (Menntaskólinn á Akureyri) a father of two.
“Ever since I was 20, I’ve been working with language,” Arnar Már remarked. “I enjoyed being able to sit down and create my own world. I also had a need to tell the story of a modern teen; enter the head of a boy and wonder what I would see.”
Arnar Már is working on “some kind of sequel” to the book, although it’s too early to promise anything about its publication.
Swedish author Katarina Frostenson was awarded the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize for the poetry book Sånger og formler. The council’s music award went to Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen for the song cycle Let me Tell You; the environmental prize was awarded to Stian Olesen and Klaus Pedersen for an app aimed to reduce food waste; and Norwegians Joachim Trier, Eskil Vogt and Thomas Robsahn won the council’s film prize for the film Louder than Bombs.
