Hello!
And thank you for reading Letter from Iceland.
My name is Alda Sigmundsdóttir, I’m an Icelandic writer and occasional journalist and commentator.
Below is a little more info about me, but if you don’t feel like reading all that, this is the tl;dr:
🔹 I was born in Iceland but moved to Canada as a child, where I (mostly) grew up.
🔹 I moved back to Iceland at the age of 31 and began working as a journalist and translator in English.
🔹 I’ve written 11 books in the last 15 years, and make my living solely from writing and publishing my own work.
🔹 I live in Reykjavík with my husband and my dog.
🔹 I have a grown daughter, three grown stepdaughters, and five step-grandsons.
🔹 Fave book: Jane Eyre Fave film: Fanny and Alexander Fave show: The Wire
🔹 Best thing about living in Iceland: fresh water, clean air, and stunning nature.
🔹 Worst thing about living in Iceland: nepotism, cronyism and the complacency of the Icelanders in the face of endless political corruption.
The unabridged version
We all have our stories: they are typically made up of objective facts and subjective experiences. What follows is the former, and they represent the surface of the water—I have written about much of this in far more depth, but for the purposes of this exposé, I’ll stick to the bare bones.
I was born in Reykjavík in December 1962. Both of my parents were Icelandic. When I was five they separated and my mother and I left Iceland for two years, first spending six months in Canada, then 18 months in Cyprus. I lived in Iceland between the ages of seven and ten, but then moved permanently to Canada with my mother, specifically to a town called Kingston, in Ontario.
At the age of sixteen I started living on my own, not entirely by choice. At eighteen I moved to Toronto, then attempted to return to Iceland to live, but wound up bouncing back to Toronto. This was in 1984-85. I got into a prestigious theatre school, but dropped out, and in 1988 moved from Canada to the UK. After approximately a year there I moved to Germany, where I lived for five years, and where my daughter Aldís was born. I moved back to Iceland as a single mom in 1994, when Aldís was nearly three. I was 31 at that time, and had lived in 29 different places. I was very tired of moving.
Coming “home” to Iceland was a relief, though I was for all intents and purposes a foreigner in this country, and had to learn to navigate it as such. This was no small task, as integrating into Icelandic society is not easy when you do not have the social networks in place that Icelanders generally form in childhood.
On moving back I got a job as a journalist and translator working for Iceland Review (which is where I met my husband), but was laid off when the company downsized. It sucked at the time, but turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me. I launched my own writing, translating and editing service, which meant I could work from home and be there when my daughter came home from school.
I wrote a novel in 2002-2003 and managed to land an agent in London, but the book didn’t sell. Feeling somewhat dejected, I decided to jump on this new trend called “blogging” that let me get my words in front of an audience (and which was the first sign that the power of the gatekeepers in publishing was beginning to wane). My blog was called The Iceland Weather Report, a wry throwback to a column I had written for Iceland Review back in the day.
My blog wasn’t about anything in particular, though I suppose “life and weather in Iceland” would be a blanket description. It was one of those blogs about everything and nothing that were so ubiquitous in those days and which showcased the amazing creative energy that was being unleashed, as people who had previously been kept out of the gates were suddenly able to get their work seen, and were writing with unbridled joy about whatever struck their fancy. Such as this one, that happened to be one of my favourites at the time, and which in fact was the inspiration to start my own.
Anyway, so here I was back in 2008 writing my nonsensical little commentaries about Iceland when suddenly BAM! everything collapsed.
It began with my bank going bankrupt. Then the two other Icelandic banks imploded. Before you could say international pariah our economy was in the toilet and no one wanted anything to do with us. (Well, except the Faroese because they are the best friend anyone could ever want or need, LOVE YOU LONGTIME 🇫🇴 🫶.)
It was all so confusing and overwhelming, and what was a girl to do but write it all down? So that’s what I did, because that’s what I’d always done when I needed to make sense of shit hitting the fan in my life. I wrote it down, and I wrote it in English, because I went to elementary and high school in Canada and English was my first language.
The whole world was watching li’l ol’ Iceland (hoping this particular brand of disaster wouldn’t happen to them 🤞🙏🤞🙏🤞🙏, nice try) and because there was hardly any information available that wasn’t in Icelandic, the world started reading my blog. All the big media outlets sent their people to Iceland, and those people wanted to pick my brain. Soon I was a regular commentator in the international media, and my blog was being quoted in newspapers from China to the US, and everywhere in between. I began receiving invitations to travel overseas to conferences and such and give talks about “the Icelandic situation”. Before long it made sense for me just to write the news that they were always asking me about, so I became the correspondent for the Associated Press, meaning my words were syndicated to thousands of media outlets the world over. I also wrote regular op-eds in The Guardian.
I wrote my first book, Living Inside the Meltdown, in response to questions I was getting about the effect that the economic meltdown was having, or had had, on regular Icelanders. I published it myself in electronic form, and it did surprisingly well.
I wrote my next book, The Little Book of the Icelanders, in the same way—initially as an eBook. That book was subsequently picked up by a traditional publisher and became an instant bestseller when it was released in print in 2012. It is still in print, and is a perennial favourite among visitors to Iceland.
It’s funny how getting a traditional publishing deal had always been one of my greatest aspirations, but when it happened … well, let’s just say I was … underwhelmed. I did not care for the treatment I received from the publishing house, and there was a pretty serious thing that happened that completely destroyed my confidence in our collaboration. And so, when it came time to publishing my next book, I decided just to do it myself.
Since then I have not looked back. I have published nine other books, plus a handful of translations of my books. They are sold in shops all over Iceland, as well as internationally through various web platforms. It makes all the difference that there are now innumerable tools and highly sophisticated technology available to independent authors like myself—such as this very platform, Substack, which easily allows readers to offer us compensation for our work.
I consider myself extremely fortunate to be able to make a living doing what I love, and never take it for granted.
As for The Iceland Weather Report—the blog that started it all—I stopped updating it (for the most part) in 2010, and formally took it down last year. Before doing so I downloaded all the content I had put up there from late 2004 to 2010. I was amazed to discover that the file with all the content was nearly 800,000 words long! An average fiction book is around 80,000 words, so that was roughly equivalent to me writing 10 books of that length in six years, or around 32 of my Little Books about Iceland!
I still write articles for newspapers or media outlets occasionally, though generally only if I am commissioned, since writing my own material and running my own publishing business keeps me plenty busy. (You’ll find a couple of recent [ish] ones here and here.)
I do frequently get asked what I am working on right now, and my answer is I’m working on writing quality content on Substack, both here and on my other site. Do I have more books in me? Sure. Are they about Iceland? Not necessarily, though there is at least one such that has been percolating for a while. 😁 As always, it comes down to having the time and the ability to shut down everything else so that I can focus … which isn’t easily obtained.
Anyway, I hope you’re a little bit more enlightened about who I am and what makes me think I’m qualified to write about Iceland.
If you have any other questions for me, feel free to drop them in the comments. Thank you for reading this far!
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