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🇦🇷 Argentina /Culture & Society

Iceland needs killers

From La Nación · () Spanish

Translated from Spanish and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

In-depth Named sources Context piece
  • Iceland publishes an increasing number of murder novels even as real homicides decline, with only eight killings recorded among its 400,000 residents in 2024.
  • Former Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir, who has co-written two crime novels, says Iceland has more fictional murders each year than real ones.
  • The country’s fascination with Nordic noir echoes its medieval sagas, which are also filled with betrayal, revenge and death.

Iceland is a country where murder stories keep multiplying while actual killings become rarer. The most violent place in the country, one account suggests, may be the crime section of a bookstore.

“Every year in Iceland there are more fictional murders than real ones,” says Katrín Jakobsdóttir, the former prime minister who has herself co-written two crime novels. In 2024, Iceland recorded just eight homicides among a population of 400,000.

That contrast has not stopped Icelandic readers from buying, reading and dreaming about the violence they do not encounter in daily life. Writers such as Ragnar Jónasson and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir have joined the Nordic noir trend, alongside Swedish and Finnish authors, with stories of isolated villages, brutal crimes and existential anxiety.

For Icelandic writers, the challenge is almost the reverse of the reader’s appetite: they must work out how to make the very idea of a violent death seem credible. The fascination raises a question the article leaves hanging: is Nordic noir where a peaceful society hides its collective unconscious?

Iceland’s attraction to tales of blood and honor also reaches back to the dozens of Viking sagas that originated there, stories of betrayal, revenge and death admired by Jorge Luis Borges. The country may be peaceful by nature, but its literary imagination remains drawn to debts of blood and honor.

Every year in Iceland there are more fictional murders than real ones.

· Katrín JakobsdóttirThe former Icelandic prime minister and crime novelist describes the contrast between the country’s literary output and its low homicide rate.
About this summary

Originally published by La Nación in Spanish. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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