About me (English)

Welcome!

I am an author and essayist. Together with my family, I live in Reykjavík. That’s why I regularly report on Iceland and Icelandic society for print media, television, and radio, and I work as a local producer for German media. More detailed information about my work for newspapers and radio can be found on this page (in German).

I was born in Preetz in 1982 and studied Theater Studies, Modern German Literature, and Scandinavian Studies in Munich, Stockholm, and Reykjavík. Since 2021, I’ve been living and working as a freelance author and essayist in Reykjavík.

My debut novel Pixeltänzer was published by Schöffling in July 2019. In the summer of 2020, my first poetry collection Partikel was released by Reinecke & Voß. My second novel Automaton was published by Berlin Verlag in spring 2022. My essay Filter appeared in 2023 in the Digital Image Cultures series by Wagenbach Verlag.

Since summer 2022, I’ve written a monthly column for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, where I answer questions about the internet, digitalization, and new technologies. I also write a regular column called Islandtief for Kursbuch, where I reflect on how the North Atlantic island connects globally through technology and how past and present intersect in the process.

Since 2020, I’ve been writing the meme culture newsletter “Phoneurie” on Substack, with several thousand readers – currently, I’m taking a short break from it. I am a member of the editorial team of the digital arts journal 54books and was part of the now-dissolved women’s authors collective Writing with CARE / RAGE.

I used to spend a lot of time on Twitter, but now I’m mostly on Bluesky. On Instagram, I share pictures from my everyday life as an author in Reykjavík. I’m also occasionally on Mastodon. I mostly watch TikToks, but sometimes post under this account: [TikTok].

From 2010 to 2021, I worked as a research associate at the Chair of Modern Scandinavian Literatures at the Institute for Finno-Ugric and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Greifswald. As a literary scholar with a cultural studies focus, my main interests include media change and modernization in the 19th century, Scandinavian film, and the influence of digitalization on literary production and reception.

I’ve also pursued my interest in Scandinavian film in various other contexts, including as guest curator of the Coast Mediale film festival in Rostock in 2014, and in the production of a music video for the Icelandic The Weird Girls Project. Occasionally, I translate literature from the Scandinavian languages (though unfortunately less often these days — I hope to find more time for it again someday).

Practical Information:

Requests for readings of my books are handled by my publishers: Pixeltänzer by Schöffling Verlag, Automaton by Berlin Verlag, and Filter by Wagenbach Verlag. For all other inquiries, I can be reached by email via my agency (Agentur Meiner) or through social media — although due to the volume of messages, it may sometimes take a little while for me to respond.