Sjón—Iceland’s prolific poet, novelist, and frequent Björk collaborator—met with fellow writer Laura van den Berg in the Harvard Bookstore to discuss his miniature historical epic, Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was. The book follows queer teenager and cinephile Máni Steinn as he travels...
Máni Steinn, a young queer boy living in Reykjavík in 1918, is fascinated by the cinema. His queerness, and his city, put him on the fringes of a society that is itself at the fringes of the world—at what seems like history's most tumultuous,...
Authors in Conversation A heartfelt introduction by Björk is a hard act to follow. But when Sjón and Hari Kunzru took the stage at Scandinavia House, The Nordic Center in America, they pulled out all the stops: David Bowie, the Sex Pistols, and the relationship between punk rock and surrealism; the moment the great god Pan stepped into our world at the beginning of the 21st century (not to mention Poseidon); the enviable lives of the "hidden people" of Iceland, who look just like us except they only have one nostril; the joy of the trickster; the value in translation; and, most pressingly, the danger of the furry trout ("The furry trout looks exactly like a normal trout, but it’s got fur.") Which is a long way of saying, read on, we dare you. Hari: Sjón is a pen name. I read in various places that it means vision or sight. Is that a family name? Sjón: Sjón is the name that I took when I was fifteen. I published my first book the summer I turned sixteen. I had discovered Icelandic modernist poetry the winter before. Even though I had seen Modernist surrealist poetry in translation before, it was when I saw it written in Icelandic and written by Icelanders that I realized that you were actually allowed to do those amazing things with words, in Icelandic.
Scandinavia House, The Nordic Center in America, 2013 Dear friends, I’d like to introduce a dear friend of mine, Sjón. I met him first when I was sixteen. With others he had started the first and only surrealist movement in Iceland, a group of six or so members called Medúsa. I was in a punk band at the time. Medúsa wrote poetry, did scandalous food performances around the city, ran a gallery (which was actually kind of a shed), had exhibitions of paintings, drawings, and sculpture, and played music. They were all around twenty years old, which, at that age, was a lot older than me. I guess I became sort of the only female unofficial member.