Even with the memory of having lived "the unforgettable experience" of her first Sant Jordi, Audur Ava Ólafsdóttir (Reykjavik, 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 the volcanic landscape of Iceland, Ólafsdóttir cannot help but marvel at the ease with which trees and flowers of all kinds grow in southern Europe, the setting of her best-known novel, Rosa candida –available in some thirty languages–, until now unpublished in Catalan, translated by Macià Riutort, as well as La veritat sobre la llum and Edèn, with which she won the Llibreter prize 2025.

Whiteout, sometimes translated as white storm, is a situation in which the white of the fog, the low clouds and the snow make you lose all spatial reference. It is also the title of a mystery novel by the Icelandic writer Ragnar Jónasson, one of those Nordic authors who have become fashionable in recent years. Here and now, as we drive through the north of his country in the middle of winter, climbing a mountain pass on a particularly tortuous stretch of the Arctic Coast Way, this meteorological expression is distressingly apt. Through the windshields I can see absolutely nothing. Moving forward is difficult, since, in dangerous terrain like this, you can end up falling off a cliff or colliding with some invisible obstacle.