Hvad er flersproget skrivning?
Remember how I introduced myself to you?
I am from Poland, I live in Iceland, and I write in English.
In my multilingual experience I am not unique in any way. For example in Iceland, where I live, according to Statistics Iceland, 21% of the population is now (early 2026) either foreign-born or second generation immigrants. That means that in my country, at least every fifth person has a deep existential experience of living between languages. Multilingual writing is writing that grows out of this lived experience and reflects the new social reality.
Multilingual writing is not a literary genre in the traditional sense (like poetry, fiction, or memoir). Instead, it’s a mode, practice, or approach to writing that engages with language from a plurilingual perspective when creating literary texts. As a cross-genre practice, multilingual writing is defined by how language is used rather than by form or subject matter. This type of approach to writing is shared by many authors, that in this course we refer to them collectively as “multilingual writers.”
Multilingual Writers
What multilingual writers have in common is that they share the experience of navigating multiple languages and cultures in their writing and life. Very often their texts blend words, structures, and expressions from different languages.
A great example is the work of Marjón, a writer and poet in Iceland whose multilingual poetry explores the migrant experience; winner of the Reykjavík Poetry Slam 2025 with “Ég neita”, she also represented Reykjavík City of Literature at Slamovision in Dublin and writes with the Speculative Zebras writers and translators collective in Reykjavík.
Another fascinating example is the work of a snæfellsjökuls rawlings, a Canadian-Icelandic interdisciplinary artist-researcher with an ecological emphasis. They created the neologism að jökla (“to glacier”), echoing glacial transformation and disappearance as an embodied poetic process:
Sometimes the “multi” aspect is only visible in writing through multiple cultural perspectives and by considering readers across languages and cultures, like in the novels of Joachim B. Schmidt, a Swiss-Icelandic writer living in Reykjavík and writing primarily in German. His crime novel Kalmann (2020), set in a remote Icelandic village, follows a neurodiverse, self-proclaimed local sheriff and outsider whose way of seeing the world reflects this multilayered experience of language, culture, and belonging.
What most multilingual writers have in common is also the practical complexity of their artistic situation. Writing from a multilingual perspective when operating in a monolignual cultural system can cause challenges. Together with Ós Pressan and Red Door we conducted a research on challenges, opportunities, and institutional support to multilingual writing in Denmark and Iceland. You will learn about our findings in the next section.
Få mere at vide
If you are interested in exploring the world of multilingual writers living in Iceland, these are the books for you:
Pólífónía af erlendum uppruna (2021) is a poetry collection edited by Natasha S., presenting the work of thirteen foreign-born poets living in Iceland, among them: Ana Mjallhvít Drekadóttir, Angela Rawlings, Deepa Radhakrishna Iyengar, Elías Knörr, Ewa Marcinek, Francesca Cricelli, Giti Chandra, Jakub Stachowiak, Juan Camilo Roman Estrada, Maó Alheimsdóttir, Meg Matich, Natasha Stolyarova, and Randi Whitney Stebbins.
Writer’s Adrift / Skáldreki (2023) is a collection of essays by ten authors of foreign origin who share their stories, writing about their desires and aspirations — touching on migration, finding their place in a new culture, discovering their voice in Icelandic, or reaching new readers in a foreign language. The collection features personal writing by Mazen Maarouf, Joachim B. Schmidt, Jakub Stachowiak, Helen Cova, Angela Rawlings, Ewa Marcinek, Francesca Cricelli, Giti Chandra, Margrét Ann Thors, and Natasha S., and is co-edited by Ewa Marcinek and Natasha S.