Laxness, Halldór

Laxness, Halldór

 orig. Halldór Kiljan Gudjónsson

(born April 23, 1902, Reykjavík, Ice.—died Feb. 8, 1998, near Reykjavík) Icelandic novelist. He converted to Roman Catholicism while traveling in Europe as a young man but later dissociated himself from Christianity and turned to socialism, an ideology reflected in his novels from the 1930s and '40s. Works exploring the social issues of Iceland include Salka Valka (1936), which deals with the plight of working people in a fishing village; Independent People (1935), the story of an impoverished farmer's struggle for economic independence; and the nationalist trilogy Iceland's Bell (1943–46). His later works were more lyrical and introspective. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955.