Dear Reader,
Hattie Williams began pursuing a music career in her teens and toured Europe extensively, making three studio albums and working as a composer before finding her way to book publishing (quite by accident). She spent the next twelve years working with some of the biggest authors in the world, and she is the former producer of the Iceland Noir Literary Festival, which takes place in Reykjavík every November. Williams continues to feed her creativity through her writing from her home in East London, where she lives with her partner and daughter.
In her debut book, Bitter Sweet... A young book publicist finds herself in an all-consuming workplace affair with her literary idol.
Reach out and welcome Hattie to the book club: [email protected]
I first set foot in Iceland in January 2014. It was a trip inspired by watching The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Ben Stiller's beautiful film set in part in Iceland which showed off the natural, wild beauty of the country. My friend and I saw it and immediately booked a five night trip for that very month.
I fell completely in love with Iceland the moment my feet hit the freezing, glittering tarmac at Keflavik airport. It was the start of one of the greatest love affairs of my life.
When people ask me why I love Iceland so much--I have now visited more times than I can even count--I am unsure what to say. How can you explain that from the moment you set foot in a new country for the very first time, you felt like you had come home? It sounds 'woo-woo' and sentimental, and I am neither of those things. But it is the truth.
It is very hard to describe the pull that Iceland has had on me since that first trip. The cold, rugged, utterly inhospitable landscape and black sand beaches have always felt familiar to me. I feel a settled, controlled calm in Iceland that I don't feel anywhere else.
But it is more than peace; it is a sense of real purpose. I feel highly creative, I feel energized, and I feel brave when I am in Iceland. I'll strip off to bathe in the wild hot springs. Standing under the strange, iridescent greens of the Northern Lights in the wilds of the remote Westfjords at 2 a.m. I feel no pull to bed, to warmth and to sleep. I just want more. More of life, more of everything. The possibilities feel endless.
People often ask me if I have family in Iceland, the answer to which is; I have a found family in Iceland. Wonderful friends that I have, over the years of visiting, formed deep and important bonds with. Together we have been through babies and weddings and devastating bereavements and divorces and illnesses and career highs, and inevitably, lows. I got married in Iceland in front of thirty of our closest friends from both the UK and Iceland. When my daughter was born, we packed up our things and moved to Reykjavík for the three months that we were allowed to stay under the new, non-EU rules UK citizens abide by, and that time with my young
family was the most precious of my life. For two years, I was the director of Iceland Noir, a festival of literature and darkness that takes place every November, and the friends I made during this time continue to sustain me.
Iceland is a truly magical place. It is more than a landscape. It is more than the Northern Lights and puffins and The Blue Lagoon and the geysirs and colourful, corrugated iron houses. This tiny island sitting on the edge of the Arctic Circle, with a population of just 393,000, is a beacon of creativity and progressive thinking. Icelanders have a unique relationship with nature; volcanos and extreme weather are accepted with extraordinary calm. Iceland has its problems--like all places do--and those problems are addressed with a voice of reason, with force and with action. It is a place with more books published per capita than anywhere in the world, and has truly extraordinary reading rates. In the cold and the darkness, Icelanders have always turned to stories. From The Sagas through to the world class crime and literary fiction they are famous for today, Icelanders have always found their way through literature.
If you have not visited Iceland, and you have the means to do so, then I urge you to, in the hope that you too will find what I have found there. If you can't, then read your way there--I promise, it's a very good second best.
-- Hattie Williams
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
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