McNally Robinson Booksellers

invites you to spend an evening with acclaimed Icelandic author

Jón Kalman Stefánsson

Wednesday October 23 at 7pm in the Atrium at McNally Robinson Booksellers

Join us for an evening with acclaimed author Jón Kalman Stefánsson as he visits Winnipeg to discuss his novel Your Absence Is Darkness (Biblioasis), a spellbinding saga about the inhabitants and inheritors of one rural community, by one of Iceland’s most beloved novelists. Featuring a conversation hosted by McNally Robinson co-owner, Chris Hall. Co-presented by the Consulate General of Iceland in Winnipeg, the Icelandic Canadian Frón, and Lögberg-Heimskringla.

The event will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a simultaneous YouTube stream.

Incandescent and elemental, hope-filled and humane, Your Absence Is Darkness is a comedy about mortality, music, and the strange salve of time, and a spellbinding saga of death, desire, and the perfect agony of star-crossed love. All "...rendered here in atumblingly beautiful translation by Philip Roughton” (Daniel Mason, New York Times).

Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s novels have been nominated three times for the Nordic Council Prize for Literature, and his novel Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night received the Icelandic Prize for Literature in 2005. In 2011 he was awarded the prestigious P. O. Enquist Award. He is perhaps best known for his trilogy: Heaven and Hell, The Sorrow of Angels (longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize) and The Heart of Man (winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize). A subsequent novel, Fish Have No Feet, was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017.

Host Chris Hall has been with McNally Robinson Booksellers for more than twenty-five years, more than ten of which as owner. When he isn't reading or walking he loves to travel and cook. He lives in Winnipeg and is currently training his daughters to be booksellers.