Career
Kristmann was born out of wedlock to a country girl who left him in the care of her impoverished family. He ran away from home at the age of thirteen. From 1924 to 1937 he lived in Norway, and returned to Reykjavík in 1938.
Kristmann worked first as a journalist, then as a writer
He wrote more than thirty books, several of them in Norwegian, of romantic fiction.