Thorarinn Leifsson

Education

He graduated from the Icelandic Academy of Arts in 1989.

Career

In that same period he was a street painter in western Europe. The book was awarded the Reykjavik Children Books Prize in 2010 and nominated for the Nordic Children’s Book Prize in 2011 – an award given out every two years by librarians in the Nordic countries. In 2001 Thórarinn wrote an autobiographical novel called The Street Painter, based on his experiences as a vagabond in southern Spain and Morocco in the late eighties.

Although illustrated like much of Thórarinn’s other work, Street painter targets a more mature audience.

The Manitoba Who Hated Children, a novel for young adults, was published in the autumn of 2014. In the sense of style this book continues were Grandmother’s Library left official

The setting is a twisted present day Reykjavik with elements of crime fiction in the storyline. Thórarinn Leifsson’s first stageplay, The Foreign Kid, premiered on November 16th 2014 in Tjarnarbio in Reykjavik.

The show received much praise and attention from the media and all 9 shows before Christmas were sold out with plans to reopen in the spring of 2015.

The rights to Thórarinn Leifsson’s books are managed by Forlagid and have so far been sold to Germany, Denmark, Norway, Faroe Islands, Finland, Estonia, Italy, Brasil, Hungary and Turkey. He has two children; Leifur Ottó born in 2011, and Salvor born in 1992.

Achievements

• The Manitoba Who Hated Children was Nominated for The Icelandic Literary Prize, the foremost prize of the northern nation. Quite an achievement for an independent theater production in Iceland.

Politics

The 70 minutes piece produced by independent theater company Glenna, is intended for 6 actors in 8 roles and deals with immigration and cultural nationalism in Iceland.

Views

In 2009 Thórarinn wrote Grandmother"s Library for children and young adults, a work inspired by the bank collapse and what the author felt was the empty materialism of Icelandic society in the years leading up to the crisis.