Ófeigur Sigurðsson, author of Öræfi: The Wasteland, will be at Deep Vellum Books on October 18, in conversation with David Searcy! Featuring music by Alex Dupree
Sponsored by the Icelandic Literature Center, with support from Iceland Naturally and Visit Dallas.
Ófeigur Sigurðsson was born in Reykjavík in 1975. He is a graduate of the University of Iceland with a degree in philosophy. He made his poetry debut in 2001 with Skál fyrir skammdeginu (Cheers to the Winter Darkness), and published his first novel, Áferð (Texture), in 2005. Since then, he has published six books of poetry and three novels, in addition to his work as an accomplished translator. Sigurðsson was awarded the European Union Prize for Literature in 2011 for his novel, Jón, making him the first Icelander to receive the prize. His novel Öræfi: The Wasteland was published in Iceland in 2014 to great critical and commercial acclaim, and received the Book Merchant’s Prize in 2014 and the Icelandic Literature Prize in 2015. He currently resides in Antwerp, Belgium.
David Searcy – back and forth between Dallas and Corsicana with his wife, the artist Nancy Rebal – is a writer whose recent essays (2013-15) have appeared in The Paris Review, Best American Essays 2013, Granta, and Esquire. An essay collection, Shame and Wonder, was published with Random House January 2016.
Alex Dupree is a musician and writer living in Los Angeles. In 2005, he made his first record with The Trapdoor Band on a cassette 4-track in Austin, TX. His latest full-length You Winsome, You Lonesome was released by Keeled Scales in June 2017. His poems have appeared in the Southern Poetry Review, FIELD, and the Madison Review.
About the Book
After a grueling solo expedition on the Vatnajökull Glacier, Austrian toponymist Bernhardt Fingerberg returns to civilization, barely alive, and into the care of Dr. Lassi. The doctor, suspicious of his story, attempts to discover his real motives for venturing into the treacherous wastelands of Iceland — but the secrets she unravels may be more dangerous than they’re worth.