(b. 1963) is one of Iceland’s most widely read and decorated authors, writing across two registers with equal confidence: upmarket fiction and crime. He has been nominated twice for the Icelandic Crime Fiction Award and seven times for the Icelandic Audiobook Awards. His books combine literary ambition with genuine broad reader appeal, and his existing fanbase is among the largest of any active Icelandic author.

Ívarsson grew up in the south of Iceland, in a landscape where crafting a verse was considered the mark of true character. At twenty, he moved to Heidelberg, Germany, where he spent a year volunteering at a nursing home, caring for a generation of women who had survived the Second World War. Listening to those women, he absorbed the emotional weight and historical texture that now define his fiction. He spent the next twenty-eight years working in the tech industry before turning to writing full-time, arriving, as he puts it, after filling the experience bank first.

He came out as a gay man in 1998, the same year he published his debut poetry collection, The Cage. He converted to Catholicism at twenty-five, and this particular vantage point, as a gay Catholic man navigating traditional spaces, gives his writing on spirituality, guilt, and redemption an uncommon authenticity. His crime fiction brings equal depth to its social concerns, addressing subjects including gender-based violence and the persecution of LGBTQ+ people across generations.

Ívarsson writes both upmarket and crime novels, series and standalones. He lives in Reykjavík with his husband, with whom he runs a boutique hotel in the city centre of Reykjavík.