Arnaldur Indridason (Reykjavik, 1961) has been one of the leading lights of contemporary Nordic crime fiction for years: he has been translated into more than forty languages, has sold more than twenty million copies of his books and is the father of Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson. The Icelandic writer has come to Barcelona to participate in the BCNegra and present his latest book, The King and the Watchmaker (RBA), where he abandons his famous detective story to travel to the 18th century. Indridason imagines an unusual encounter between the Danish monarch, Christian VII (1749-1808), and a watchmaker from an Iceland where children are dying of hunger, epidemics ravage the population, and they have to dig through metres of snow to get out of their peat huts.