Solveig Eggerz
Author
Solveig Eggerz was interviewed
for BookCast by Fairfax County Public Library Director Sam Clay.
A native of Iceland, Solveig Eggerz comes from a long-line of storytellers. Her great-great grandfather, a farmer and a protestant minister, wrote his autobiography when he was in his 80s, a book that documented 19th- century Icelandic regional history. Her grandfather, who was twice prime minister, wrote plays and essays. Her father, a foreign service officer, wrote fiction and non-fiction until the day he died at age 80.
Eggerz has lived in Alexandria since 1974. She has worked as a journalist and professor of writing and research. Her first novel, Seal Woman, was published in May 2008 by Ghost Road Press.
Seal Women is set in the late 1940s and chronicles a German woman’s journey to Iceland to work on a farm in response to an ad from the Icelandic Agricultural Association which was looking for laborers to work on farms.
Eggerz became interested in writing the novel after seeing an Icelandic movie, “Maria,” about a woman who came out of the rubble of Berlin and worked on a primitive farm in Iceland. In addition to not speaking the same language, the Icelanders did not encourage the German laborers to speak about their experiences. As the daughter of a diplomat stationed in Germany, she used some of that experience in writing the novel.