Halldór Laxness (Author) Halldór Laxness (1908-98) was born near Reykjavik, Iceland. His first novel was published when he was seventeen. The undisputed master of contemporary Icelandic fiction and one of the outstanding novelists of the twentieth-century, he wrote more than sixty books. Laxness was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955.Susan Sontag (Introducer) Susan Sontag is the author of four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover and In America which won the National Book Award, 2000. She is also the author of I, etcetera, a collection of stories; several plays, including Alice in Bed; and five works of non-fiction, among them On Photography and Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. She died in 2004.