Jón Gnarr was born in 1967 in Reykjavík. He formed the Best Party in 2009 and became the mayor of Reykjavík in 2010. His acting work includes the movies The Icelandic Dream and A Man Like Me and the television series The Night Shift, which aired on BBC4. As a child, Gnarr was diagnosed with severe mental retardation due to dyslexia, learning difficulties, and ADHD. He nevertheless overcame his hardships and went on to become one of Iceland’s most well-known actors and comedians, and published the first two volumes in his fictionalized autobiography in 2006, The Indian, and 2009, The Pirate (the third volume, The Outlaw will be published in Iceland in fall 2015–Deep Vellum will publish the trilogy in full in 2015-2016).
In late 2009 Gnarr formed the joke Best Party with a number of friends with no background in politics. The Best Party, which was a satirical political party that parodied Icelandic politics and aimed to make the life of the citizens more fun, managed a plurality win in the 2010 municipal elections in Reykjavik, and Gnarr became Major of Reykjavik (there’s a great documentary on Gnarr’s campaign, which introduces you to Gnarr’s unique and inspiring personality, called Gnarr).
His term as mayor ended in June 2014 and he plans to use his post-mayor years to continue writing and speaking on issues that are most important to him: freedom of speech, human rights, protecting the environment, and achieving international peace. Now that his term as mayor is complete, he has moved to Texas to focus on writing, speaking on issues he holds most dear (world peace, sexual and gender equality, freedoms for writers and journalists), and performing stand-up comedy again.
Lytton Smith (born 1982) is an Anglo-American poet and translator. His most recent poetry collection is The All-Purpose Magical Tent (Nightboat Books, 2009), which was selected by Terrance Hayes for the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize in 2009, and was praised by Publishers Weekly in a starred review as “…fantastic and earthy, strange and inherited, classical and idiosyncratic, at once.” He also has a previous chapbook, Monster Theory, selected by Kevin Young for the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship in 2008. Additionally, Smith’s poetry has appeared in a number of prominent literary journals and magazines such as The Atlantic, Boston Review, Tin House, and many others. Lytton Smith was born in Galleywood, England. He moved to New York City, where he became a founder of Blind Tiger Poetry, an organization dedicated to promoting contemporary poetry. He has taught at Columbia University, Fordham University, and Plymouth University, and is currently a professor at SUNY-Oneonta. He has translated two other novels from Icelandic: The Ambassador, by Bragi Ólafsson (Open Letter 2010) and Children in Reindeer Woods by Kristín Ómarsdóttir (Open Letter, 2012).
Lytton Smith is a poet, professor, and translator from the Icelandic. His most recent translations include works by Kristin Ómarsdóttir, Jón Gnarr, Ófeigur Sigurðsson, and Guðbergur Bergsson. His most recent poetry collection, The All-Purpose Magical Tent, was published by Nightboat. Having earned his MFA and PhD from Columbia University, he currently teaches at SUNY Geneseo.
