Twenty renowned foreign writers have accepted invitations to the Reykjavík Literature Festival to be held September 11-17th, 2005.
According to a press release the theme of the festival will be the relationship between literature and the world, and how literature interacts with the political and global developments of recent years.
Guests include: Canadian poet, novelist, and critic, Margaret Atwood, winner of the Booker Prize 2000 for The Blind Assassin; Hanan al-Shaykh, Lebanese novelist, short-story writer, and playwright, one of the leading contemporary women writers in the Arab world; DBC Pierre, Australian (although he has told the press he prefers to consider himself a Mexican), winner of the Booker Prize for his novel Vernon God Little; Britain’s best-selling author Nick Hornby, his novels include High Fidelity, and About a Boy; Chair of Literature at the University of Siena, Antonio Tabucchi, one of the foremost Italian champions of Portuguese literature; Kurdish novelist Mehmed Uzunm; Columbian writer Alvaro Mutis; Finnish poet and author, Kari Hotakainen, winner of the 2002 Finlandia Prize for Literature; two of Noway´s most celebrated contemporary writers, Roy Jacobsen and Lars Saabye Christensen winner of the 2002 Nordic Literature Prize for Half Brother; Spanish short-story writer and essayist, Javier Cercas, his work Soldiers of Salamis was chosen one of the best translated foreign works in Britain in 2003; Ukranian screenwriter, cinematographer and writer Andrei Kurkov, his topics have covered the changing society in post-Soviet Russia; Minnesota’s Siri Hustvedt, whose most recent novel is What I Loved; Canadian-born Graeme Gibson who has written for film, television and radio and whose just published novel is The Bedside Book of Birds; East German writer, Thomas Brussig, whose novel, Heroes Like Us, is set around the fall of the Berlin Wall; French playwright and novelist, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt; Karen Duve, short story writer born in Germany, her first novel Rain, was published in 2002; Danish columnist, tv-journalist and best-selling fiction writer, Hanne-Vibeke Holst, her novels deal with modern women; Karin Wahlberg a gynecologist who wrote her first novel at 51 years of age and has since become critically acclaimed in Sweden; London novelist and short story writer James Meek, he also writes for the Guardian and has received a number of British and international awards for his 2004 reporting from Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. Meek’s 2002 article on Iceland genetic firm, deCode Genetics, Decode was meant to save lives…now it’s destroying them, caught attention worldwide.
Fifteen Icelandic writers will also be participating in the festival, their names are to be announced at a later date.
This is the seventh Reykjavik Literature Festival, the festival was first held in 1985 and will thus be celebrating its twenty year anniversary.
More information can be found on the festival’s website www.bokmenntahatid.is
