Milli mála - 2020, Qupperneq 208

208 Milli mála 12/2020
MULTILINGUAL WRITING IN ICELAND

10.33112/millimala.12.7
published or nominations for major awards arise, as was the case
when Maarouf’s Jokes for the Gunmen was nominated for the 2019 Man
Booker International Prize.
To launch one’s literary career in Iceland as a foreign-origin author
is new territory for which Ós Pressan has been both witness and sup-
port. Ós members Ewa Marcinek and Helen Cova have opted over the
past few years to initiate their first publications within Iceland. Their
examples are indicative of the non-conventional paths that foreign-
origin authors devise in order to participate in the Icelandic publish-
ing industry and circulate within the national arts scene. The public
reception to Cova’s and Marcinek’s written and staged literary output
can be analyzed through event attendance, sales figures, and media
coverage.
Autofiction author Ewa Marcinek originates from Poland, where
she completed a BA in Creative Writing and an MA in Culture Stud-
ies at the University of Wrocław prior to immigrating to Iceland.
From 2015 to now, Marcinek has developed a multilingual (English,
Icelandic, and Polish) collection of short stories and poetry entitled
Polishing Iceland based on her personal experience as a Polish woman
living in Iceland. An excerpt from her manuscript was translated into
Icelandic by Helga Soffía Einarsdóttir for Sjón’s guest-edited issue of
Tímarít Máls og menningar.54 The issue focused on addressing the
question “What is an Icelandic writer?” partly through inclusion of
foreign-origin texts in translation.
Since 2017, Marcinek has been invited to read her work at numer-
ous literary events, particularly those with an emphasis on multicul-
turalism such as Reykjavík City Hall’s Lesum heiminn / Read the
World.55 In 2018, Marcinek consulted for The National Theatre of
Iceland on written and spoken Polish language included in their pro-
duction Svartalogn.56 Her theatre contribution led to director Pálína
Jónsdóttir inviting Marcinek to join her in the founding of Reykjavík
International Theatre Company in 2019. Before the year finished, the
company adapted fiction by Marcinek, Mazen Maarouf, and Elías
54 Marcinek, Ewa, “Ísland pólerað”, Tímarít Máls og Menningar, 2016.
55 “Lesum Heiminn / Read the World”, Bókmenntaborgin, 2018, https://bokmenntaborgin.is/lesum-
heiminn [accessed 28 April 2020].
56 “Svartalogn“, Þjóðleikhúsið, 2018, https://www.leikhusid.is/syningar/svartalogn [accessed April
28, 2020].