The sparsely populated country’s literary traditions date back some 800 years, to the Nordic sagas.

Black at Night and Read All Over

Though Iceland is smaller than many American cities, it has one of the largest per capita publishing industries in the world. Could it all be because of the dark?

By Jonathan Margolis

Bjarni Thór Pétursson is a 43-year-old civil servant living in Iceland’s capital, Reykjavík. One evening just after Christmas 2022, with no previous interest in being an author, he started writing a short, semi-autobiographical novel about a man of his age, living in Reykjavík, longing for the freedom of youth and re-assessing his past relationships with women.

It was the kind of earnest cri de coeur many sensitive people think about turning into a novel but rarely do. And if they do, they stand almost zero chance of a commercial publisher taking any interest.