Audur Ava Ólafsdóttir: "An appendicitis attack at 10,000 meters altitude can be inspiring"

BarcelonaStill with the memory of having lived "the unforgettable experience" of her first Sant Jordi, Audur Ava Ólafsdóttir (Reykjavík, 1958) strolls through the garden of Club Editor, the publishing house that has already published three of her unclassifiable novels, where an unwavering faith in the human race shines. Accustomed to Iceland's volcanic landscape, Ólafsdóttir cannot help but marvel at the ease with which trees and flowers of all kinds grow in southern Europe, the setting for her best-known novel, Rosa candida –available in about thirty languages–, until now unpublished in Catalan, translated by Macià Riutort, as well as The Truth About Light and Eden, with which she won the Llibreter Prize 2025.

"What I've experienced in Barcelona doesn't happen anywhere else in the world," admits the author, who has come after a tour that has taken her through countries like Canada, Norway, and France. Published in 2007, Rosa candida tells the story of Lobbi, a 22-year-old Icelandic young man, who goes to a monastery that houses one of the world's best rose gardens with the aim of restoring its lost splendor. The boy is the father of a nine-month-old baby girl, but he has barely ever seen her, and with the mother, he has only had a one-night stand. The distance from his family and country will lead Lobbi to begin reconfiguring his feelings and discovering his true priorities.

If there has been a book in her career that has been considered an editorial phenomenon, it has been Rosa candida. What does she remember of the novel's international journey?

— What happened to me with this book was an absolute surprise. Everything I have written, I have done thinking of a single person, the invisible sprite sitting on my shoulder.

I remember we had talked about it when, a long time ago, Alfaguara publishedThe Exception (2014).He told me that if he only had him "he would already be happy".

— The first translations of Rosa candida, which in Icelandic has another title, L'esqueix, were into Danish and French. Without anyone being able to foresee it, the novel became a success in France. From that moment on, it has been translated into more and more languages, and there are already about thirty.

Why do you think it captivates so many readers around the world?

— During promotional trips and presentations, I have received some interesting answers in relation to this question. One time, a man told me that in Rosa candida he had found something that was missing in his life. Now that I have experienced my first Sant Jordi, which has been an unforgettable experience, and I say this with all my heart, I come out convinced that literature allows us to build bridges between people: thanks to reading we can know how others live and think.

Just like in his novels, he always knows how to see the good side of reality.

— Literature makes it possible for us to live many lives. It allows us to travel without leaving home.

How was the story of Rosa candida born?

— It occurred to me more than 20 years ago. I wanted to write a book about the fatherhood of a young gardener. After spending a few hours with a stranger in her greenhouse, she gets pregnant and meets him to tell him she's going to have the baby.

At those times he was approaching 50 and had just published two novels.

— I was never a young prodigy. I skipped that stage. In fact, I didn't start writing until I was 38. Perhaps I started late because the books I had inside me were permeated by existential questions. I needed to have had certain experiences and suffered, before I started. Even when you have a happy life, your soul suffers. If you want to write, you have to learn to feel compassion for others. First you need to grow, change, learn some things about yourself and the world.

Before writing, he studied art history in France, right?

— Yes. For a time I came to think in French. It was from France that I began to rethink the possibilities of my mother tongue. It is as if I had become a writer long before publishing anything.

But it took time.

— Leaving Iceland to return. Then, once you are back home, you rethink many things.

What was Audur Ava like who started writing Rosa candida?

— I was going through a delicate moment. I had just divorced and was taking care of my two daughters alone, because my ex-husband had left Iceland for work reasons. Perhaps for all these reasons I began to think of a young and attentive father and a mother, also young, who needs more freedom. Many readers have told me that they would have loved to have a partner like Lobbi, someone who knew how to take care of them, who cooked well and respected their decisions. I was writing a book where there was something I was missing in my life, as that reader would tell me years later.

Do you think there are more young fathers like Lobbi, currently?

— I would say that in one generation things have changed a lot. One of the comments I've liked most from Catalan readers these days is that they find Rosa candida is a novel about trusting others.

Would we have a better life if we were less distrustful?

— We live in a world where politicians use fear to control citizens and where the arms industry is increasingly powerful. People suffer more and more. In contrast to this reality, in Rosa candida I spoke of a young man who is innocent but not naive, because Lobbi is intelligent: he believes there is no reason to think that others are bad by nature. I remember a Danish critic compared Lobbi to Prince Myshkin from Dostoevsky's The Idiot by Dostoevsky, who also did not see evil in others.

The story the novel tells is that of a simple journey that begins to get complicated from the start. When he is on the plane, Lobbi begins to feel very unwell, and as soon as he gets off, they have to admit him quickly and operate on him.

— This is a very personal detail that ended up having to do with the conception of the novel. At the beginning of the century I came to Barcelona to curate an exhibition of Icelandic artists. It was during that trip that the chapter in which Lobbi and Anna conceive their daughter in a greenhouse occurred to me. Before I started researching more about the lives of those two characters, something happened during the return trip.

Don't tell me it was an appendicitis attack, like the character's...

— Yes. I was on a plane full of Icelandic artists, and I, as the art curator, was supposed to lead them, but I felt worse and worse. I remember crying in pain at the back of the plane. I had to have emergency surgery when we landed. This is the most autobiographical link between Rosa candida and me.

Despite the discomfort he felt, he was able to include him in the novel.

— An appendicitis attack at 10,000 meters altitude can be inspiring.

Between this and the greenhouse story, Rosa candida began to take shape.

— It was a time when I was very busy. In addition to taking care of my daughters, I taught art history classes at the University of Reykjavík. I snatched time to write whenever I could: in the evenings, on weekends, or when I had a few days off.

It is describing my life.

— It is a stage that many writers have had to go through. I remember that, for years, on my way to university I used to pass by the house of an Icelandic writer. I saw him every day sitting by the window, working on one of his books. He was a good author. I dreamed that one day I too would get up early in the morning and be able to start writing one of my novels.

Did it happen to him thanks to the success of Rosa candida?

— No. This did not happen to me until 2019, when I retired from the university.

Do you write all day now?

— I get up very early and get to work. Sometimes I wonder if I should stop at four in the afternoon, because I could keep going and going... One of the good things about having had a professional life outside of writing is that I've learned to organize myself very well. While I'm thinking about novels, I don't forget about the practical matters of life.

One of the particularities of his novels is that his characters keep family very much in mind. In Rosa candida, for example, Lobbi leaves, but he is in contact with his father and with Josef, his autistic brother.

— There are many twin siblings in my literature. The idea of the double has always attracted me. In the case of Rosa candida, Josef is autistic: he doesn't know how to lie and is always silent. At the same time, Josef likes to dress well and is always very elegant. Lobbi's father is an old man who misses his wife, who died a year earlier in a car accident. He takes care of his two sons as best he can. It is true that the idea of family is central to the novels I have written, and this deviates from much contemporary literature, which is focused on solitary characters, without many ties, who ponder philosophical ideas about their lives.

Sometimes the protagonists are young, but he has a weakness for elderly characters. It happens here, but also in The Truth About the Light.

— In the novel I will publish in Icelandic this autumn, one of the main characters is 103 years old and still has plans for the future. She is the protagonist's grandmother. They live together.

Why does Lobbi, who has had no relationship with his daughter, agree to take care of her as soon as her mother, Anna, proposes it to him?

— At first he is not aware of his responsibilities, but he soon accepts them. Being a father must be a very abstract matter. A mother has physical contact with the child from gestation, because she feels it growing inside her. A father is different. Furthermore, if we think about Lobbi, he doesn't even know he got Anna pregnant... But one day he receives a call from her to meet. He goes to the cafeteria and finds that she, instead of ordering a coffee, drinks a glass of milk. This is when he begins to suspect that something is wrong. It is not the only case where a man finds out about his future fatherhood this way. In fact, the story I tell is based on that of a friend of mine.

Did his friend also take care of the creature?

— Yes. She shared custody with the child's mother, but they were never together, except for the day of conception. Fortunately, they both became good friends and, later, even got married, each on their own. He has always had a good relationship with this daughter, and now that the girl –who is a visual artist– has made him a grandfather, he picks up his grandson from kindergarten every Friday. They are a close-knit family, in their own way.

Sometimes, reading a book by her we have the feeling that what happens in it is better than what we have had to live in the real world. This young and attentive father could have ignored the girl. In fact, she herself had recently divorced, when she was writing Rosa candida, but instead of writing a revenge novel against men, she wrote one of love. Why?

— In real life I am more pessimistic than in my novels. In fact, each of my books has been born from a specific situation of despair. In Rosa candida there was the personal issue, in Edèn it was climate anxiety. The world is not as I would like it to be, but I refuse to be overcome by dark forces. Life is simpler than they tell us: we need food, a bit of fun and peace. We also need hope. Even when we know that things will not go well, we need to believe that they will. It is like the character of the father in La vida és bella, by Roberto Benigni, a film that I found wonderful.The father invents that everything that happens inside the concentration camp is a game, even though he knows that sooner or later he will be killed. Above all, he wants the child to survive.