The Strongest Woman in the World - Paperback

by Steinunn Helgadóttir (Author), Larissa Kyzer (Translator)

She has the strength to move the world--but chooses to hold it still.

Siblings Eiður and Gunnhildur grow up in a household balanced uneasily between emotional volatility and unspoken grief--a home where their parents are never happy at the same time. When tragedy fractures the family, the siblings are separated, their lives diverging in unexpected and quietly extraordinary ways.

Eiður turns to activism, seeking order and justice in a world that rarely offers either. Traveling to Lesbos to lead a group of rebel activists aiding the refugee crisis, he fears that he lacks the passion and empathy necessary to enact true social change. Gunnhildur, who hides a physical strength most would find unimaginable, becomes a funereal beautician, renowned for her ability to lend peace and dignity to the dead. In her meticulous care for the bodies of others, she finds a way to hold the world still, if only briefly.

These two threads--Gunnhildur's superhero-like strength and Eiður's activism--come together at a jail, where Gunnhildur attempts to prove that she really is the strongest woman in the world.

Author Biography

Steinunn G. Helgadóttir (b.1952) is a visual artist and well-known Icelandic poet and prose writer. She received The Icelandic Women's Literature Prize 2016 for her novel Voices From the Radio Operator's House. Helgadottir's work has been exhibited at solo and group art exhibitions around the world. She has also curated numerous art exhibitions in several museums and galleries in Iceland.

Larissa Kyzer is a writer and Icelandic literary translator. Her translation of Kristín Eiríksdóttir's A Fist or a Heart was awarded the American Scandinavian Foundation's 2019 translation prize. The same year, she was one of Princeton University's Translators in Residence. Read LessIn 2020, Larissa cofounded Eth & Thorn, a chapbook press dedicated to Icelandic poetry and short fiction in translation. Larissa is co-chair of PEN America's Translation Committee and runs the virtual Women+ in Translation reading series Jill!