Thorarinn Leifsson

Who is Thorarinn Leifsson?

Þórarinn Leifsson is an Icelandic author and illustrator. He graduated from the Icelandic Academy of Arts in 1989. In that same period he was a street painter in western Europe.

Leifsson worked as an illustrator and web designer for many years before taking up writing. First in the form of controversial comic strips in the early nineties. Then came Total Freedom, written with his wife in 2001. But his real debut as an author was Father's Big Secret, a book about a family with a horrible family secret: the man of the house is a cannibal. It was very well received by critics and soon published in Denmark, Finland and Germany. Next came Grandmother's Library, inspired by the bank collapse and the empty materialism of Icelandic society before the crisis. It was awarded the Reykjavik Children's Book Prize in 2010 and nominated for the Nordic Children's Book Prize in 2011 – an award given out every two years by librarians in the Nordic countries.

Þórarinn's latest work is The Street Painter, a novel for grownups with black and white illustrations. It is based on the author's experiences as a street painter and tramp in Europe and Morocco.