Kristín Ómarsdóttir

An astonishing dystopian novel about a woman's discovery of a community of swan-people from one of Iceland's greatest writers. In the not-too-distant future, a young spy named Elísabet Eva is about to discover something that will upend her carefully controlled life. Elísabet's work is the lynchpin of her existence in the city; her friends and social life centre around the Special Unit. But recently Elísabet has found herself taking long solitary walks near the lake. One day, she sees two creatures emerging from the water, half-human, half-swan. She follows them through tangles of thickets into a strange new reality. Elísabet's walks turn into regular visits to these swan women, who reveal to her the enigma of their secret existence, and their deepest desires. Pulled further and further into the monomaniacal, and often violent, quest of the swanfolk she finds her own mind increasingly untrustworthy. Ultimately, Elísabet is forced to reckon with both the consequences of her involvement with these unusual beings and a past life she has been trying to evade. *SHORTLISTED FOR THE ICELANDIC WOMEN'S LITERATURE PRIZE* PRAISE FOR KRISTIN OMARSDOTTIR: 'Ómarsdottir's skills as a poet and playwright are evident' Helen Oyeyemi, New York Review of Books

Swanfolk

For over three decades, the work of Kristín Ómarsdóttir has thrived in the vanguard of Icelandic literature. Waitress in Fall offers anglophone readers the first substantial selection of her poems in translation. Spanning thirty years and seven collections – from her first to her latest – this wide-reaching introduction celebrates a vital voice in contemporary European poetry. Kristín Ómarsdóttir’s work resists the sweet, the neat or the certain. Her poems delight in the lush mess of actual life, in its hands and fingers, lemons and clocks, socks, soldiers, snow, knives, mothers, nightstands, sweat, and crockery. The domestic is at the heart of the poems, but it is a domesticity tinged with threat: something ‘clear and ominous’ persists between the lines. These are surreal, unsettling landscapes, in which children lap milk from trees and car tyres are ‘soft as skin’. But Kristín’s poems are also full of laughter, sex, and love. They accept vulnerability as a condition of intimacy. Erupting ‘wherever thirst is ignited’, they are not afraid to strike, to rage, recognising a right – a responsibility – to risk the necessary word, even to ‘wound the language’.

Selected Poems

Waitress in Fall

Lytton Smith

When paratroopers invade Children in Reindeer Woods, a "temporary home for children," and kill everyone except eleven-year-old Billie before turning on one another, the last soldier decides to adopt the peaceful lifestyle of a farmer with young Billie.

Kristín Ómarsdóttir

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