Issue 4 - September/October 2026

At the time of this writing, I have been translating Steinunn G. Helgadóttir’s for almost exactly a decade. Her first book, Raddir úr húsi loftskeytamannsins, or ‘Voices from the Radio Operator’s House,’ came out in Iceland in the spring of 2016 and was one of the first books I read in Icelandic in its entirety. I fell in love immediately. Structured as a short story cycle—a format Steinunn has gone on to favor in her work, including in The Strongest Woman in the World, the novel this story is excerpted from—the book was inventive, offbeat, quirky, and deeply heartfelt. Its characters included the titular radio operator, who builds himself a Faraday cage to go fishing for all the unused stories flitting mercurial and fish-like through the atmosphere; a shy shop girl who orbits nightly around downtown Reykjavík in an attempt to forget the somewhat distressing fact that she’s pregnant; brothers in possession of a secret—perhaps sacred—hamburger recipe; and a ne’er do well who finds love after death, having been reincarnated as a crow.

The wacky sweetness and deep empathy I loved in the (as-yet-unpublished-in-English!) ‘Radio Operator’ is equally present, and perhaps more finely honed, in The Strongest Woman in the World, which is forthcoming as part of Open Letter’s Icelandic triptych this fall. This novel-in-stories stars Gunnhildur, a woman whose remarkable gifts are ones she exercises almost completely in private. Not only is she the titular strongest woman, possessing of a super physical strength that she (almost) never unleashes, she can also communicate with the dead. The latter skill is particularly handy in her day job as a funeral beautician, but the dead tell no tales, as the saying goes, and so her skills in this arena fly completely under the radar.

I would argue that The Strongest Woman is a quintessential ‘soft power’ novel. Told in alternating viewpoints—that of Gunnhildur, her older brother, the adventitious activist Eiður, and a rotating chorus of the recently deceased—it‘s a book with a delightfully intricate plot, involving everything from Houdini-esque escapes to dumpster diving recipes to an unintentionally itinerant polar bear and the eco-warriors dead-set on setting it free. But underneath all of that, it‘s a book about forging and maintaining human (familial) connection, about our shared need to be heard as much as seen, and about knowing when—and how—to step up and be a force for change. In her ideosyncratically poetical, deeply feeling, and delightfully visual prose, Steinunn (who is a photographer and was an art curator in a former life), shows us the two sides of the coin when it comes to making change happen: direct, overt, and confrontational action aimed at wholesale systemic overhauls contrasted with change that’s more incremental, more personal, more focused on making waves in one’s immediate environment and letting the aftereffects ripple outwards.

Spoiler Alert: The Strongest Woman in the World saves the day. But she does it in her own way, understanding implicitly that having power doesn’t necessarily mean exercising that power—or flaunting it.

Larissa Kyzer, March 2026, Flatbush, Brooklyn