Enjoying Life Near Arctic Circle
Kolbrún Valbergsdóttir Valby and Einar Ingi Einarsson.
Author Kolbrún Valbergsdóttir Valby and her husband Einar Ingi Einarsson moved to the village Raufarhöfn, Northeast Iceland, last year — a move they’re glad to have made.
She is a crime novel and science fiction/fantasy author, who writes in Icelandic as well as English, in addition to being an audio book producer, while he is a geographer. She has a distribution contract with the Swedish audiobook streaming subscription service Storytel and records her audiobooks in the garage.
From Raufarhöfn. Kolbrún and Einar live in the red house at the center.
The couple loves living in Raufarhöfn, population 190. It is one of the northernmost villages in Iceland. The Arctic circle barely touches the coast, and the village is known for the Arctic Henge — Iceland’s largest outdoor work of art, inspired by the prehistoric monument Stonehenge in England.
The Arctic Henge.
Kolbrún and Einar had been contemplating moving to the countryside for a long time. “The only goal was to move to a quiet place, close to nature, where we’d have more time to ourselves and for our projects,” Kolbrún tells Morgunblaðið in an interview.
Ever since she was a child, she has dreamt of being a writer. “The goal always was to become a writer, but after graduation from university, I ended up in the technical sector, where I worked for 20 years,” she relates. “In the end, I could no longer ignore the desire to be creative, and moving up north has made it possible for me to focus on that alone.”
Sunrise in January.
“We got a beautiful house at a unique location,” she continues. “ We have all the services we need in a small, but tight community.” The isolation is much less than they had expected, since there is little snow in the winter and roads remain open most days of the year. She describes the residents as hard-working and caring toward their neighbors.
What has surprised the couple the most is the children in the village.
“There aren’t many of them, but they’re so mature and unafraid to express themselves,” she notes. “Last summer, I met a young fellow, who had opened his own bakery next to the grocery store in order to collect money to buy fish and chips at a restaurant here in Raufarhöfn. He just sat there, openly chatting with foreign tourists about the quality of the food and the advantage of having access to freshly caught fish at the harbor. In such a small community, every individual matters, and children benefit from that.”
