Ragnar Jonasson

From the age of seventeen Ragnar Jónasson turned fourteen Agatha Christie novels into Icelandic, and her sense of plot has marked everything he has written since. Born in Reykjavík in 1976, he qualified as a lawyer, taught copyright law at Reykjavík University and reported for the national broadcaster RÚV. His Dark Iceland books follow the young officer Ari Þór Arason around Siglufjörður, the northern fishing town his father's family came from. The Mist closes the Hulda trilogy, three novels about the Reykjavík detective Hulda Hermannsdóttir told in reverse: The Darkness catches her at the end of her career, The Island moves back to 1997, and The Mist to the snowbound winter of 1987, when a couple cut off on a farm in the east of the country hear a knock at the door. Victoria Cribb translated it into English. In 2013 he helped found Iceland Noir, the country's crime writing festival.