Sigurðardóttir wins crime novel award

The Blóðdropinn literary award for the Icelandic crime novel of the year for 2014 was given yesterday to Yrsa Sigurðardóttir for her novel DNA.

The award, known as Blóðdropinn (meaning ‘the drop of blood’) in Icelandic, has been awarded by the Icelandic Crime Literature Association since 2007.

The winning novel each year becomes Iceland’s entry to the Glass Key award, an annual literature award given to a crime novel by an author from the Nordic countries. Iceland has not won the Glass Key award since 2003.

Summing up their decision, the Icelandic Crime Literature Association jury states that “[o]ne of Sigurðardóttir’s great strengths is her ability of build excitement, expectation and dread in her books and she has achieved this well in DNA. […] More and more characters are unexpectedly dragged into the plot and more murders are committed. Sigurðardóttir manages to keep the reader in the grips of excitement and expectation right up to the last page and gives us a truly unexpected and unpredictable ending.”