Milli mála - 2020, Blaðsíða 200
200 Milli mála 12/2020
MULTILINGUAL WRITING IN ICELAND
10.33112/millimala.12.7
journal. Mindful of the gatekeeping practices around literature in
Iceland, the strongest restriction in the call was a limit of five, A4
pages per submitter. Even this was put in to ensure the broadest
number of voices in the first journal.
Authors are otherwise not limited by genre, language, format, or
theme. Even their connection to Iceland was phrased as needing to be
“on, about, or otherwise connected to” the island. Ós Pressan has,
over the years, also started to organize activities outside of the capital
area, meaning Reykjavík and its surrounding municipalities. This
started with a reshowing of the exhibit This is Ós/Þetta er Us, which
had originally been in the Reykjavík City Library, at the central li-
brary in Akureyri, the largest town in the north of Iceland. In 2018,
one of the members moved to Akureyri and has since then organized
several events there. In 2020, Ós Pressan received a grant from the
city of Akureyri to organize a series of writers’ workshops there. In
2020, another member of Ós Pressan spent several months in the vil-
lage of Þingeyri in the Westfjords at a writer’s residency. Members
going to other parts of Iceland have extended the nonprofit’s presence,
but the bulk of the publishing happens in Reykjavík.
By spring 2020, Ós Pressan had published four issues of its an-
nual journal and held a number of workshops and readings. The first
journal featured six languages, the second eight had eight, the third
had five, and the fourth had eleven. Ós - The Journal is an example of
migrant literature and multilingual literature of which the following
section provides an overview.
4. Methodology and Positionality
Ós Pressan is presented as a unique case study in a country where the
bulk of immigration and diversifying demographics has occurred
largely in the 21st century, rendering it non-comparable to literary
landscapes in other Nordic or European countries. Moreover, single
case studies have an important and long-standing tradition in the
social sciences.37 Though there is a trend for cross-case analysis, that
37 Blatter, Joachim and Markus Haverland, “Relevance and Refinements of Case Studies”, Designing
Case Studies, Berlin: Springer, pp. 1–32, doi: 10.1057/9781137016669_1