Victoria Cribb works as a freelance translator and is the translator of the best-selling and award-winning Icelandic crime writer Arnaldur Indridason. She co-translated Arctic Chill with Bernard Scudder, and also translated Hypothermia and Operation Napoleon and is currently working on the next in the series, Black Skies (provisional title), Arnaldur’s response to the Icelandic banking crisis. Victoria talks about the insights and challenges of translating crime fiction, and gives examples of...

Crime fiction expert Barry Forshaw has talked to or interviewed virtually every writer in the Nordic Noir field, for various newspapers, magazines, TV and radio, as well as for his forthcoming book on Scandinavian Crime Fiction (due January 2012). He has a fund of insights (and anecdotes) about the authors and their work, and is equally au fait with the work of the publishers and translators who are helping to make the field the hottest in the entire crime fiction genre. If you’re an...

Richard Wall of Aon Benfield UCL Hazard Centre, Department of Earth Sciences, joined us to discuss the use of geological and (literary) historical information to set the scene for modern crime novels. The Aon Benfield UCL Hazard Centre is Europe’s leading multidisciplinary academic hazard research centre, which focusses on Geological Hazards, Meteorological Hazards & Seasonal Forecasting, and Disaster Studies & Management. Introduced by Dr Reynir Por Eggertsson (UCL Scandinavian...

Yrsa Sigurdardottir is the internationally acclaimed Icelandic novelist, author of Last Rituals (2008), My Soul to Take (2009), and Ashes to Dust (2010). Yrsa's main protagonist is the lawyer Thora Gudmundsdottir, who through her job in a small Reykjavik law firm, stumbles upon weird cases of mysterious deaths, past and present. In her latest book in English, Ashes to Dust, it is the unveiling of three dead bodies and one human head under a pile of ash from the 1973 volcanic eruption in the...

Francis Hopkinson of Left Bank Pictures joined to discuss the UK adaptation of Henning Mankell’s Wallander starring Kenneth Brannagh. As executive producer of the series, Hopkinson was a key figure in the decision-making processes behind the programmes. He shared his unique overview of the programmes with us, took us all the way from the inspiration for the series to the finishing touches, and joined our discussion of imagery of Sweden in crime fiction. Introduced by Agnes Broome (UCL...

Hakan Nesser is the award-winning, best-selling author of over 20 novels - he is one of Sweden’s most popular crime writers. His most famous character, Inspector Van Veeteren, stalks the streets of a fictional Northern European city called Maardam, and his pessimistic outlook is a seemingly familiar trait of the ‘Scandinavian mentality’. But Nesser himself is a far remove from this: he lives in London, is frank and friendly, and likes very much to question the stereotypes associated with his...