Hallgrímur Helgason (born February 18, 1959) is an Icelandic painter, novelist, translator, and columnist.
Biography Hallgrímur Helgason was born in Reykjavík, Iceland, on February 18, 1959. He started out as a painter but gradually became a writer as well. His best known books are 101 Reykjavik (1996), The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning (2008) and The Thousand Degree Woman (2011). Two of his novels have been turned into films and four of them have been adapted for the stage. He has held over 30 solo exhibitions in Iceland, Sweden, Denmark and France, and his works can be found in the collections of several art museums.
Hallgrímur's father, Helgi Hallgrímsson, was an engineer, the former head of the Icelandic Road Administration. His mother was Margrét Schram, a retired kindergarten teacher. His sister Nína Helgadóttir works for the Red Cross, his brother Gunnar Helgason is an actor and an award-winning writer of children's’ books, and his brother Ásmundur Helgason works in advertising and publishing.
In 1984 Hallgrímur fathered his first child, Hallgerður Hallgrímsdóttir. In 1985, he met flautist Áshildur Haraldsdóttir, a student at the Boston Conservatory. They lived together in Boston, New York and Paris, got married in 1988 and divorced in 1992. In the years 2003–2009, Hallgrímur lived with Oddný Sturludóttir, a city councilor. They have two children together, Kári Daníel born 2003, and Margrét María born 2005. Since 2009 Hallgrímur has been living with Agla Magnúsdóttir, senior adviser at the Icelandic Literature Center. Hallgrímur and Agla live in Reykjavík and the island of Hrísey, with his younger kids and a dog named Lukka.
1980s
Hallgrímur started out as a visual artist, studying at the Iceland Academy of the Arts (1980–81) and The Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany (1981–82). Unsatisfied with both, he started painting on his own, mostly romantic colorful and “beautiful” landscapes inspired by his native Iceland, a clear break with the current fashions of conceptual and minimal art. After a couple of personal shows in Reykjavík, he spent the winter of 1985–86 in Boston, where he showed at Bromfield Gallery on Newbury Street, and met the Starn Twins (Doug and Mike Starn) and other artists represented by Stux Gallery, located in the same building.
From 1986 to '89 Hallgrímur lived in New York City, painting and drawing, with moderate success, showing at Hal Bromm Gallery, Stux Gallery and other places. In an effort to support himself he started writing weekly articles for a newspaper back home in Reykjavik, describing life in the Big Apple. He also developed his own weekly radio program, named “Radio Manhattan”, for Icelandic State Radio, recording his impressions of the streets and life around his home in Hell's Kitchen and shipping them up north on a cassette. Encouraged by the good reception to the articles, as well as his radio rants, Hallgrímur felt the pressure to take a break from painting and try to write a novel.
First novel Hallgrímur Helgason's first novel, Hella, was published in 1990, a visual and cinematic story that takes place in the small village of Hella, situated in southern Iceland, an agricultural county surrounded by the volcanoes Mt. Hekla and Eyjafjallajökull and famous for its big earthquakes. Hallgrímur aims for a totally objective tone, tries to stay away from poetic descriptions and the use of adjectives. The text never enters the mind or the feelings of the characters, describing everything from the outside. It's an attempt at letting the inner world be read through the signs of the outer visual world. Inspired by Flaubert's Madame Bovary as well as Duchamp's Large Glass, the book tells the story of one summer in the life of a 14-year-old girl who gets her first job at the highway diner and has her first sexual encounter in a tent at the local horse fair. The latter coincides with a small earthquake shaking the area. The novel can be read as one big metaphor for the transition from virgin to woman. The novel received a lukewarm reception—at most the critics said the book was interesting—and sales were modest.
Paris years Between 1990 and 1995 Hallgrímur lived in Paris, painting and writing. In New York the subject of his paintings had shifted from landscape to figures: stylized in the manner of Keith Haring and the late eighties, it seemed the artist was trying hard to update the Picasso nude. In Paris his paintings at first turned more “European”, in the manner of (the American) George Condo, until Hallgrímur found his more personal style, more realistic and cartoonish at the same time, by leaving out the background. The figures were painted in the middle of a canvas which was left virgin white around them. In Paris, Hallgrímur had two solo exhibitions in the early nineties, at Galerie Alain Gutharc and Galerie Philippe Rizzo.
Here he also wrote his second novel, Þetta er allt að koma (Things Are Going Great), which was published in 1994, and became Hallgrímur's breakthrough as a writer. Here he found his true writing voice, his own style overflowing with words, ideas and stories. The book is an ironic take on the traditional Icelandic mini-celebrity biography, a genre that was very popular at the time. Ragga Birna is a “famous” actress and musician who remembers her life in the most positive light. Her life is full of failures, but she meets all of them with the self-delusional phrase “Things are going great!”. She goes from the piano to violin, from violin to viola, from viola to singing, from singing to acting, from acting to movie-acting, from movie-acting to bad movie-acting. The reader slowly learns that this woman has never had any talent for any art in her life. Yet her whole being has been commit-ted to fulfil her dream of “making it” as an artist. The character of Ragga Birna and her tragic life story was based on Hallgrímur's impressions of the artist's life in Iceland and the States during the seventies and eighties, and makes good fun of the big eighties idea of “making it”. Indeed, the book makes fun of almost every aspect of artistic life in Iceland in the years from Ragga's birth in 1959 until she finally reaches her “stardom” in 1994, when she is paralysed from waist down in an accident on the set of a no-budget Icelandic Viking movie and ends up on the front page in a wheelchair, all smiling and happy with her long overdue fame.
The book became a local hit and a theatre version was put on stage at the National Theatre of Iceland in 2004, directed by Baltasar Kormákur.
101 Reykjavík Hallgrímur spent autumn 1995 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, NY, writing his third novel, 101 Reykjavík. It was published in 1996 and turned into a successful movie in the year 2000, directed by Baltasar Kormákur and starring Hilmir Snær Guðnason and Victoria Abril. The novel takes its title from the postal code of the Reykjavík downtown area. It is a first person narrative, set in the strange mind of Hlynur Björn, a mid-nineties slacker who never leaves the downtown area, is unemployed and lives with his mother. He spends his days on the internet or watching videos, and his nights at the K-bar, a fictional hangout based on the famous Kaffibarinn, which at the time was partly owned by Damon Albarn, the famous singer of Blur. The novel coincided with and accidentally captured the rise of Reykjavík as a trendy city, launched by the fame of its best known citizen, Björk.
Hallgrímur invented the character Hlynur Björn in the summer of 1990 and used him from time to time as his own Borat, allowing him guest appearances on his radio show, Radio Manhattan, and thus developing his strange style of thinking and talking over a period of five years. The idea for the plot came partly from the French movie, Gazon Maudit, by Josiane Balasko (also starring Victoria Abril), and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Like Hamlet, Hlynur Björn becomes burdened by his mother’s sex life, when she comes out of the closet as a lesbian, and introduces him to her girlfriend, the much younger Lolla, whom Hlynur Björn already has slept with. Things get even more complicated when it is revealed that Lolla is pregnant.
The book was originally met with negative reviews and poor sales in Iceland, but later found an international readership, after the movie won prizes at several film festivals. It was nominated on behalf of Iceland for the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 1999. It became a bestseller in Italy and Poland and has been published in 14 languages. American novelist Tim Sandlin famously wrote in his review: “Imagine if Henry Miller had written Tropic of Cancer on crack instead of wine.”
Author of Iceland Since 1996 Hallgrímur has been living in his hometown, Reykjavík. In 1998 he published his first book of poetry, Collected Poems 1978–1998. A truly post-modern work, it was all written in the Icelandic nineteenth-century tradition of rhyming poetry, full of jokes and irony, with a nod to American rap lyrics, and was a clear break with the serious modern tradition of the twentieth century in Icelandic poetry. There were no poems about nature, silent lakes or lava fields.
In 2001 Hallgrímur published his biggest and most ambitious novel, Höfundur Íslands (The Author of Iceland). It was a succès de scandale, since the main character was based on the biggest Icelandic writer, Halldór Laxness (1902–1998), who received the Nobel prize in 1955. The novel tells the story of a very old and famous Icelandic writer who dies and wakes up inside a novel he wrote some fifty years earlier. Thus the author lives on in his work. The main character, Einar J. Grímsson, is partly based on Laxness and the novel he's trapped in is inspired by Laxness's biggest novel, Independent People. Its publication caused outrage among the old leftist elite in Iceland who felt it was sacrilege to write about Laxness, especially his communist past. The Author of Iceland has been translated into German, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish and Italian. It won the Icelandic Literary Prize in 2001.
Grim Since 1995, Hallgrímur has been working on his cartoon self and alter-ego called Grim. A Tintin-style mélange of Dracula and Pinocchio, the long-nosed and fang-toothed character symbolizes the role of the artist/writer, who sucks blood out of real people's lives and then goes on making up stories about them. Hallgrímur has made paintings and drawings featuring Grim, and devoted a couple of exhibitions to this strange fellow. A catalogue, “Best of Grim”, was published in Iceland in 2004, by Forlagid, and in 2005 French publisher Actes Sud published a book, Les Contes de Grim, featuring all the existing Grim works.
Mr. Universe — a "ciné-roman"