Hallgrimur Helgason (b.1959) started out as an artist, showing his work in several galleries of both New York and Paris, where he lived in the eighties and nineties. He made his debut as a novelist in 1990 and gained international attention with his third novel, 101 Reykjavik, which was made into a film starring Victoria Abril. Since then, one other book has been filmed and four of his novels have been put on stage, home and abroad. Helgason has received the Icelandic Literary Prize three times, for The Author of Iceland in 2001, for Sixty Kilos of Sunshine in 2018 and Sixty Kilos of Knockouts in 2021. He also won the Icelandic Audiobook Award 2021 for his reading of Sixty Kilos of Sunshine.

In 2016 Hallgrimur Helgason received the Icelandic Translation Prize for his rendering of Othello into Icelandic, and in 2015 he won the Icelandic Theatre Award for “Best Play” for his stage version of his novel, Woman at 1000 Degrees. Three of his novels have been nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. The Hitman’s Guide to Housecleaning became an Amazon bestseller in 2012, and Woman at 1000 Degrees won the Best Translated Book Prize in France in 2014. The autobiographical Seasick in Munich was selected as one of “The Ten Best Books of 2015” in the German newspaper Die Zeit, and nominated for the Icelandic Literary Prize in 2015. Sixty Kilos of Sunshine was selected as “Book of the Year” by the German newspaper Kieler Nachrichten in 2020.