Nordic literary salon online: The Fires. A Novel

We are back after the summer break! Now let’s visit Iceland. Martina Kašparová, a translator from Icelandic, will tell us more about her newest translation: The Fires: A Novel by Sigríður Hagalín Björnsdóttir. Published in Czech in 2022 by the publishing house Argo.

The event will be streamed on Thursday, September 15, from 20:00 on our Facebook page. The recording will later be accessible on our Youtube channel.

Free admission, no registration needed.


The Fires. A Novel (translated into Czech by Martina Kašparová and published by Argo in 2022) is a heart-wrenching thriller about a woman’s desperate quest to save the people she loves from a natural disaster. After an eight-hundred-year slumber, the volcanoes in Iceland’s most populated region are showing signs of life. Earthquakes dominate the headlines. Echoes of the devastating eruptions in the past stir unease in the people. Volcanologist Anna Arnardóttir has spent her entire life studying the volcanic powers under the earth’s crust, but even she cannot fathom the catastrophe at hand. As a series of eruptions threaten most of Iceland’s population, she’s caught off her rational guard by the most terrible natural disaster of all—love. The world as she knows it is about to fall apart, and so is her heart. Caught between the safety of a nation and her feelings for her children, her lover, and her past, Anna embarks on a dangerous journey to save the lives of the people she loves—and her soul.

Sigríður Hagalín Björnsdóttir (b. 1974) studied history in Salamanca, Spain, journalism at Columbia University in New York, and previously worked in Copenhagen before moving back to Reykjavík, where she lives with her husband and two daughters. Her bestselling debut Island (2016) was nominated for the Icelandic Women’s Literature Prize in 2017. When she isn’t writing, Sigríður works as the deputy head of news and a television news anchor at the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service. Her second novel, THE HOLY WORD, was published in December 2018. Her latest book, THE FIRE: A NOVEL was published in 2020.


Martina Kašparová studied Swedish and German at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University and Icelandic at Reykjavík University. At the moment, she translates mostly from Icelandic, and her translations include such authors as Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, Sjón, Halldór Thoroddsen or Ragnar Jónasson. She has now for years lived in Iceland.


The partner of the event are the Czech translators of the North – an organisation uniting Czech translators from Nordic languages. The event is a part of a year-long project of the Scandinavian House: “Nordic literature in the heart of Europe 2022”, which has been supported by Prague municipality and the Czech Ministry of Culture.