About Halldór Laxness
Halldór Kiljan Laxness (Icelandic: [ˈhaltour ˈcʰɪljan ˈlaxsnɛs]; born Halldór Guðjónsson; 23 April 1902 – 8 February 1998) was an Icelandic writer and winner of the 1955 Nobel Prize in Literature. He wrote novels, poetry, newspaper articles, essays, plays, travelogues and short stories. Writers who influenced Laxness include August Strindberg, Sigmund Freud, Knut Hamsun, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, Bertolt Brecht, and Ernest Hemingway. == Life == === Early life === Halldór Guðjónsson was born in Reykjavík in 1902. When he was three, his family moved to the Laxnes farm in Mosfellssveit parish. He was brought up and enormously influenced by his grandmother, Guðný Klængsdóttir, who "sang me ancient songs before I could talk, told me stories from heathen times and sang me cradle songs from the Catholic era". He started to read books and write stories at an early age and attended the technical school in Reykjavík from 1915 to 1916. His earliest published writings appeared in 1916 in Morgunblaðið and in the children's periodical Æskan. The same year, two letters-to-the-editor Halldór wrote also appeared in the North American-Icelandic children's newspapers Sólskin, which was published in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Laxness then attended and in 1918 graduated from the Reykjavík Lyceum.
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