Lilja Sigurdadottir - OUT OF SCANDINAVIA: Drag Me to the Dark Side: Queer Identity and the Allure of Crime Fiction

Born in 1972 in Iceland, she grew up in Mexico, Sweden, and Spain before returning to Iceland, where she lives now. She made her fictional debut with the crime novel Steps, published in 2009 to strong reviews. In 2014, Lilja’s theater play Big Babies was awarded the Icelandic Theatre Prize Gríman, for Best Play of the Year. She followed this with the global blockbuster Reykjavik Noir crime novel trilogy: Snare (2015), Trap (2016), and Cage (2017), all nominated for major awards. As a screenwriter she has worked with filmmaker Baltasar Kormákur on the Netflix science fiction/supernatural TV series Katla, which premiered in 2021. Lilja, who identifies as queer, is known for crime novels that reimagine the genre, featuring lesbian protagonists as criminals, victims, and resilient survivors, sometimes all at once. Her latest series of thrillers, named after its principal protagonist, a financial investigator named Áróra, consists of five novels, Cold as Hell (2019), Red as Blood (2020), White as Snow (2021), Dark as Night (2022), and Black as Death (2023). Lilja’s audio series, One hundred Mishaps of Hemingway, received top honors in the 2023 The Storytel Awards.

The Gustavus Out of Scandinavia Artist-in-Residence Program is proudly supported by the Marguerite Olson Pratt Out of Scandinavia Artist-in-Residence Program Endowment Fund. The fund was established by Charlotte (Pratt) '86 and Henrik '88 Nordstrom of Minneapolis, Minnesota in honor of Charlotte's late mother Marguerite, member of the Gustavus Class of 1953, life-long educator, and avid promoter of all things Nordic.