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Icelandic author Jón Kalman Stefánsson and the country of France will be the guests of honor at this year’s Budapest International Book Festival.
The 29th annual event will be held between September 26 and 29, according to the Association of Hungarian Publishers and Book Distributors.
Stefánsson is one of the most important Icelandic authors of contemporary literature. Born in Reykjavík in 1963, he worked as a bricklayer, in a butcher’s shop, in a fish processing plant, spent a summer as a policeman at Keflavík airport, and later became a high school literature teacher and librarian.
Stefánsson’s writing career began with poetry. His first volume was published in 1988, and he started writing novels, followed by international success.
In 2005, he won the Icelandic Literary Prize for his work Summer Light, and Then Comes Night , and in 2011, he was awarded the Per Olov Enquist Literary Prize. In 2017, his novel Fish Have No Feet was nominated for the International Man Booker Prize, and in 2022, he won the French Prix du Livre Etranger for the best foreign language book of the year.
In his richly woven stories that combine the everyday present and the often painful past with an unparalleled psychological insight, he blends poeticism with a flawless sense of style and proportion, and a richly detailed description of the harsh and often cruel Icelandic landscape and nature.
His novels are always about the most important things in life, and the plot, at once twisty and mosaic-like, brings to the surface what love, pain, and death are like with elemental experientialism.
Stefánsson’s novels have been translated into many European languages. His book Fish Have No Feet was first published in Hungarian in 2018, by Typotex Publishers, translated by Bence Patat. One of his major works, the trilogy Heaven and Hell, awarded the Icelandic Literature Prize, was published in 2019 by Jelenkor. The trilogy was named Book of the Year 2019 by Book Magazine.
The author first attended the Budapest International Book Festival in 2018.
Every year, the Budapest International Book Festival hosts a country or region as a guest of honor. This year, the focus is on contemporary French literature, with some of the most important French contemporary authors taking part.
Via MTI; Featured Image: Facebook / Budapesti Nemzetközi Könyvfesztivál