Soffía Bjarnadóttir

Soffía Bjarnadóttir, novelist, playwright and poet born in Reykjavík 1975. Her prose and poetry induces a mystical dark and haunting tone, playing with myths, death and rebirth. Her first novel, Segulskekkja (Magnetic Declination) was published in 2014, receiving the New Voices Grant from the Icelandic Literature Fund and was published in France by Éditions Zulma. Her first poetry collection, Beinhvít skurn (Bone White Shell) was published in 2015 and in the second one, Ég er hér (I Am Here), from 2017, she writes about the beauty and cruelty of love as a catalyst for transformation.

Soffía holds Cand. mag. in Comparative Literature and Cand. mag. in Creative Writing. She has also studied Theater Studies and participated in different collaborative works in theater and creative writing. Ég erfði dimman skóg (I Inherited A Dark Forest) is a work of seven poets writing together. Her theater play Erfidrykkjan (The Wake) was staged as a collaboration effort of Reykjavik City Theatre and Reykjavik Arts Festival 2018. Her second novel, Hunangsveiði (Honey Hunting), published in 2019, describes a journey from Iceland to Portugal where longing and legacy of hurt are transformed through the realm of the senses.

Poems from her collections have been translated to English and recently to Portuguese and published in Eufeme, Magazine de Poesia. Verði ljós, elskan (Let There Be Light, My Love), is her most recent work, published 2021.