Yrsa Sigurðardóttir

Yrsa Sigurðardóttir graduated from Menntaskólinn í Reykjavík High School in 1983 and then began studying civil engineering at Háskóli Íslands, graduating in 1988 with a Bachelor of Science. She continued her studies at Concordia University in Montreal and earned a Master of Science degree in 1997. Today, she lives with her husband and two children in Seltjarnarnes near Reykjavík and works as an engineer at the Kárahnjúka Dam in eastern Iceland. Here she has been writing her books in her hut since 1998.

Yrsa Sigurðardóttir has written five children's books since 1998. In 2000, the Icelandic section of IBBY (International Board on Books for Young People; to German: International Board of Trustees for Young People) awarded Yrsa for her book Við viljum jólin í júlí.

In 2005 her first crime novel Þriðja táknið was published, in 2006 in Germany under the title The Last Ritual. This was followed in 2006 by a second crime novel, Sér grefur gröf, which was published in Germany in 2007 under the title The Frozen Light. Since then, another crime novel or thriller by her has been added every year. Not only because she has provided her humorous, single mother investigator, lawyer Þóra Guðmundsdóttir, with a German lover, the ex-policeman Matthias, she is particularly successful on the German book market. Similar to the French second-profession writer Fred Vargas, she creates two professions at the same time.

Her crime novels are characterized by particularly dark sceneries and her discreet affinity for the supernatural. Typical of Yrsa in particular is the juxtaposition of several narrative strands, which change from one setting to another – usually from chapter to chapter – and whose connections with each other only become visible in the course of the novel.

Her thriller Ég man þig, which was published in German translation in 2011 under the title Geisterfjord, was made into a film in 2017 under the title I Remember You.

The crime novel Brakið (Death Ship), published in 2011 by the Icelandic publisher Veröld Verlag, was published with a very high initial print run of 16,000 copies.