Multi-award-winning Icelandic author, playwright and screenwriter Lilja Sigurdardottir (b.1972) is one of the most popular writers of Icelandic thrillers. She has written both stage plays and screen plays in addition to her popular novels. All her books are a fast-paced and exceptional crime drama with unexpected twists and turns.

Sigurdardottir has won the Icelandic Crime Novel Award twice, and both titles represented Iceland at the Nordic Crime Novel Awards. She has also been longlisted for a CWA International Dagger Award, one of the world‘s most prestigious crime fiction awards, Prix du Meilleur Polar at Points and Edinburgh International Book Festival’s First Book Award. Her novel Cage was selected as one of the 30 best European crime novels of the last 40 years, by Le Temps 2020. The film rights to her Reykjavik Noir trilogy have been bought by Palomar Pictures in California. As a screenwriter she has worked for instance with Baltasar Kormakur on the Netflix science fiction/supernatural TV series Katla (premiered 2021).

Lilja Sigurdardottir has a razor-sharp eye for location and plot and has produced a colourful and exciting cast of characters. Lilja’s crime thrillers are highly visual, almost as if written for a screen audience, with rapid changes of viewpoint and short chapters that crank up the pace and the tension.

“Breathtakingly original, with many twists and turns you never see coming. Thriller of the year.”
NEW YORK JOURNAL OF BOOKS

“Sigurdardottir has revealed herself to be another of Iceland’s major authors.”
LE DEVOIR, FRANCE