Hildur Knútsdóttir for Women in Horror Month
1. Introduce yourself. What do you want people to know about you and your work?
I’m Hildur, a writer from Iceland. I have been writing for a long, long time, but my first English translation came out in September, a horror novella called The Night Guest, published by Tor Nightfire.
2. Who or what were your earliest horror influences?
I think it is probably X-Files. I was obsessed with that show growing up and I loved everything about it.
3. How much does Icelandic identity inform your work? What about the Icelandic identity do you find crucial to communicate when you write?
My Icelandic identity probably informs my work a lot. I grew up here, we take our language and our literature very seriously. So of course that shapes my work, there is just no way to escape that – nor do I want to!
I am also a firm believer that when it comes to being creative you should embrace the things that set you apart from other creatives, and being from a nation of 390,000 people certainly does that. Simply being such a small community makes a lot of the aspects of living in Iceland weird to other people and I am often surprised when things that we find completely normal, other people find deeply weird. We also have so much amazing, creepy stuff in our sagas and our folklore that contemporary Icelandic writers have barely started to scratch the surface of, so there is a lot of work to be done!
4. Take us through a day-in-the-life of Hildur Knútsdóttir.
My years are quite cyclical. I think I probably only spend about half of the year writing, the other half is spent thinking about the thing I want to write next and doing research, or caught up in promotion.
We have this really crazy publishing phenomenon called Jólabókaflóð, or The Christmas Book Flood, where all the books come out at the same time before Christmas and you do a lot of readings, and everyone is talking about books. It’s great, but really stressful!
I usually don’t sit down to write until I feel that I know everything that will happen in the story, and when I have nothing on my schedule for months, and that’s probably why I can write pretty fast when I finally start drafting.
But a typical day always starts with coffee and breakfast, then me and my dog Uggi walk my daughters to school. If I am writing, then I will go to the office I share with a few writer friends and write all day. If I am not writing I will likely go home and read on my couch until my children get home. If I have to do promotion I will probably be cursing having to get out of my sweatpants and put on presentable clothes.
5. Imagine you're standing in front of a crowd of every horror creative—authors, filmmakers, podcasters, journalists, etc. What would you want them to know about your experience as a woman in the genre?
My experiences have been great, personally. Everyone I have met and interacted with has been very nice and welcoming. But the creative industries (as most industries, sadly) have been very male-centric since forever, and that has to change. We need other viewpoints, too. Horror is a genre that directly taps into the fears we have, and the world is a dangerous place to be a woman. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of my favorite horror writers are women.
Hildur Knútsdóttir is the author of The Night Guest, released by Tor Nightfire in September 2024. Her novelette The Shape of Stones is due from Tor later this month.