Kristín Helga Gunnarsdóttir was born in Reykjavik in 1963. She studied Spanish at the University of Iceland and the University of Barcelona. She graduated from the University of Salt Lake City in Utah with a BA-degree in Media Studies and Spanish Literature in 1987. Kristín Helga worked as a reporter for Channel 2 in Iceland for 11 years before she became a full time author and journalist. Her first book, the children’s book Elsku besta Binna mín, was published in 1997. Since then she has written around forty books, for adults and children, short stories, novels, tv-scripts and teaching-materials, including the award-winning Fíasól. The book series about Fíasól will be published in Russian in Moscow this year. German and Icelandic film producers are working on a TV series about Fíasól which will be filmed in Iceland. Her newest book is Fíasól og furðusaga um krakka með kött í maga, published in 2020.
Kristín Helga has won numerous awards and prizes for her work, including the 2008 Nordic Association of School Librarians’ Children’s Book Prize and Fjöruverðlaunin – The Women’s Literature Prize three times.
Kristín Helgas book Vertu ósýnilegur – flóttasaga Ishmaels (“Be invisible – the story of Ishmael’s escape”) was nominated to the Nordic Council Children and Young People’s Literature Prize in 2018. Ishmael is a fictional boy created by Kristín Helga. She based her story on the experiences of the 300,000 unaccompanied child refugees currently in Europe in search of a home and a future. The story is based on source material and interviews with Syrian families in Iceland. She shows the young reader a peaceful and colourful society now ruined by the war, a society that the refugees will always miss. Kristín Helga delivers a very powerful story about how disasters and wars can affect the reality of those living far away from the war zone.
Her book Fjallaverksmiðja Íslands was published in 2019 and is about seven newly graduated mountaineering students. Although they cram themselves into the same car outside the highschool in Hofn, they are each going their own way. Fate takes them all to the same old army barrack near Jokulsarlon Glacier Lagoon, however, where they found The Iceland Mountain Factory – a utopian society where nature takes precedence. In this free state they instruct and build, cook, knit, brew, love and dream; and their lives are streamed live online, where more and more people are watching. One day, however, Emma is found with life-threatening injuries in the lagoon, and everything changes.
Apart from writing and teaching Kristín Helga has also worked as a guide, been on the board of the Iceland Nature Conservation Association and on the board of the Writer‘s Union of Iceland – for which she was chairman from 2014-2018.