Auður Ólafsdóttir - The Greenhouse

Audur Ava Olafsdottir was born in Reykjavík, Iceland, in 1958. She studied art history and art theory in Paris and is a lecturer in history of art at the University of Iceland and a director of the University of Iceland Art Collection. She has curated art exhibitions in Iceland and abroad, for example, at the Venice Biennale, and written about art and art history in various media.

Audur Ava is the author of three novels, a book of poetry, and a play. The first novel, Raised Earth , was published in 1998. Rain in November was published to rave reviews in 2004 and received the City of Reykjavik Literary Award. The Greenhouse , published in 2007, won the DV Culture Award for literature and a women’s literary prize in Iceland and was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Award. Since The Greenhouse was published in France in the autumn of 2010 under the title of Rosa Candida , the book has attracted a great deal of coverage in the French media and received unanimously good reviews. In September 2010, it received the Prix de Page literary award as the best European novel of 2010. The Prix de Page award is determined by a group of 771 bookstores in France where the book was on the best-seller’s list for five consecutive months. The novel was also nominated for three other literary awards in France, including the prestigious Femina award. In January The Greenhouse won the Canadian 2011 Prix des libraires du Québec award. Audur Ava Olafsdottir published The Hymn of Glitter , a book of poetry, in 2010, and her first play will premiere at the National Theatre of Iceland in September 2011.

Audur Ava Olafsdottir’s middle name, Ava, was adopted a few years ago as a tribute to the blind medieval French saint, Ava. Audur Ava Olafsdottir lives and works in Reykjavik.

As a translator and playwright, Brian FitzGibbon has a particular passion for the translation of fiction. With experience that spans over twenty years, he has translated a vast array of film scripts, treatments, stage plays, and novels, working exclusively into English from Italian, French, and Icelandic.

His translation of the Icelandic cult novel 101 Reykjavik by Hallgrimur Helgason, published by Faber & Faber in the United Kingdom and Scribner in the United States in 2002, was hailed by the Guardian as “dazzling” and the New York Times as “lucid.”

Brian’s one-act play, The Papar , was staged by the Abbey Theatre at the Peacock in Dublin in 1997, and subsequently adapted into a short film called Stranded , premiered at the Tribeca Film Center in New York one year later. An Icelandic translation of the play was broadcast on Icelandic radio in 2005 and nominated for a Gríman Award the same year.

His full-length play, Another Man , was a finalist at the Playwrights Slam at the 2005 Chichester Theatre Festival in the United Kingdom. A radio adaptation of the play was broadcast on Icelandic State radio in the spring of 2008 and nominated for an Icelandic Gríman Award.