Last night I attended a reading at Mr. B’s Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath. The guest was Icelandic poet, lyricist and novelist, Sjón. He was on his way home from the Hay Festival, and I’m seriously impressed that Mr. B’s got him. Why is he such a big name? Well, he wrote the lyrics for the opening song of the Athens Olympics. He was nominated for an Oscar for a song from the Catherine Deneuve film, Dancer in the Dark, which he wrote with his friend and frequent collaborator, Björk. His novel, The Blue Fox, won Iceland’s top literary prize, has been translated into 23 languages, and in the UK was a finalist for The Independent‘s Foreign Fiction Prize. He’s good.

The main reason I was there is that his novel, The Whispering Muse, has just been translated into English, and it definitely counts as fantasy. It is the sort of book that UK literary critics will be able to pigeonhole as “magic realism” so that they can read it without catching fantasy cooties, but there’s a very strong mythic element to it. One of the characters is a Greek hero who sailed on the Argo and is still alive in 1949.

So I went along to see if I could get this guy to send the jury his book for next year’s Translation Awards, and we ended up having a lovely conversation that ranged from Phil Dick and Robert Sheckley to Johanna Sinisalo and the Avengers movie. Win!

I’ll have a review of The Whispering Muse up in a few days time.