Photo: Hreinn Guðlaugsson / CC BY-SA 4.0Acclaimed author Jón Kalman Stefánsson will be in Winnipeg on Wednesday, October 23, to discuss his latest novel, Your Absence Is Darkness, in the Atrium at McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park Shopping Centre, at 7:00 p.m. His presentation will also be livestreamed on YouTube.

A spellbinding saga about the inhabitants and inheritors of one rural community, 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. It has been characterized as incandescent and elemental, hope-filled and humane. And Daniel Mason of The New York Times has declared Philip Roughton’s translation to be “tumblingly beautiful.”

Chris Hall, co-owner of McNally Robinson, is so enthusiastic about Your Absence Is Darkness that he will personally engage Jón Kalman in what is sure to be a fascinating conversation about his latest work.

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 and has since been made into a movie by director Elfar Aðalsteins. 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.

This author’s event at McNally Robinson is co-presented by the Consulate General of Iceland in Winnipeg, the Icelandic Canadian Frón, and Lögberg-Heimskringla.