Halldór Laxness

Laxness left school young and by his teens was already publishing; restless and searching, he spent much of the 1920s abroad, converting to Roman Catholicism and living for a time at a Benedictine monastery in Luxembourg before drifting to Hollywood, where failed screenwriting work sharpened him into a fierce critic of American capitalism. He returned to Iceland a committed socialist, visiting the Soviet Union and remaining sympathetic to Communism for decades before growing disillusioned as its abuses became undeniable.

Independent People (1934–35), his saga of a stubborn crofter's ruinous self-reliance, became his international breakthrough and remains Iceland's best-known novel abroad. He went on writing prolifically (sagas, satires, memoirs) across six more decades, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955, the only Icelander to do so. He died in 1998 after some years living with Alzheimer's disease.