There was a time in Iceland when television simply disappeared on Thursdays. For a child growing up there, entertainment often meant something quieter: going to the swimming pool, playing with friends, and reading. A lot.
Margrét Tryggvadóttir remembers books being everywhere in her childhood. She read them, returned to them, and read some of them again. Years later, she realized that rereading had taught her something beyond literature. When you return to the same story, you notice what escaped you the first time. You question earlier judgments. You begin to understand that the same characters and events can look completely different depending on where you are standing. Perhaps that is one of the earliest lessons literature gives us: there is almost always another way of seeing.
In this episode of Intangiblia ™ , I speak with Margrét about writing for children and young adults, copyright, Iceland’s tiny literary market, streaming, contracts, representation and her years in public life. But beneath all of those subjects runs something much simpler and more beautiful: the responsibility and possibility that come with putting a story into someone else’s hands.
The books we carry with us
Writing for children comes with a particular kind of responsibility. Margrét speaks about the difference between encountering a powerful book as an adult and encountering one while you are still becoming yourself. As adults, a book may shift our perspective. For a child, it can help shape the perspective itself.
Children may carry a character, an idea or even a single sentence with them for decades. A story can quietly become part of the architecture through which they understand themselves and other people. Margrét takes that privilege seriously, while insisting on something equally important: the message can never overpower the story. Because readers do not enter books looking for a lesson. They enter looking for another world.
A book has to make another book possible
We often talk about writing as though the story ends when the manuscript is finished. For the author, that is only one part of the journey. A book must be edited, published, distributed, discovered, translated, perhaps adapted, and, ideally, earn enough for the person who created it to keep creating. That is where copyright stops being an abstract legal concept. Margrét puts it very simply: without copyright, writers could not continue doing what they do.
She describes the life of a book almost as a series of possibilities. Hardcover. Paperback. Translation. Foreign editions. Audiobooks. Perhaps film or television rights. Each right can become another path for the story and another source of income that helps finance the next book. But technology is changing that sequence.
Streaming can introduce books to entirely new audiences. It can also change the economics beneath them. In a country as small as Iceland, where every reader matters, that tension becomes particularly visible.
Writing for an island
Iceland has around 400,000 people. When Margrét writes for a ten-year-old reader, her potential domestic audience is only a few thousand children of that age. This creates an unusual relationship between writers and readers. Icelandic authors can visit schools, meet readers, speak with librarians and remain remarkably close to the people reading their work.
There is intimacy in that smallness. There is also an economic limit. Even a successful author may need several sources of income, older books continuing to sell, library remuneration, public support, translations and other work alongside writing. Copyright matters precisely because all of those small streams add up. A royalty here. A library loan there. A foreign edition. A school purchasing another classroom set. Together, they can determine whether someone has enough space and time to sit down and write another book.
Sometimes a story gives you new eyes
One of the most personal moments in our conversation comes when Margrét talks about writing characters whose experiences were very different from her own. For a long time, she had seen people represented through narrow and often distorted stereotypes. Then someone close to her gave her a much more intimate view of a reality she had not really been looking at before. She describes the experience as putting on a new pair of glasses and suddenly noticing a part of the world that had always been there. That image stayed with me because it captures how profoundly our perspective can change when something distant suddenly becomes personal.
Writing often begins in moments like that. Something happens, someone enters our life, or we realize that what we thought we understood was incomplete. Margrét chose to learn more, question what she thought she knew, and write characters with greater care and humanity. Stories can do exactly that for readers too: challenge assumptions, reveal what we have overlooked, and make unfamiliar experiences feel closer. Sometimes the most meaningful shift begins with seeing the same world again, but with different eyes.
Not every author needs the same path
As Chair of the Icelandic Writers’ Union, Margrét sees clearly that no single career strategy works for every writer. Streaming is a perfect example: an established author may feel it undermines sales, while for an emerging writer it can become the place where readers discover the work for the first time. Margrét shares the example of an author whose first book sold only a few hundred physical copies before finding a much larger audience through streaming. The financial return remained small, but the visibility transformed her career, which is why questions of reach, remuneration and control cannot be answered with one rule for everyone.
Read the contract before you give away the future
Economic freedom also depends on one decidedly unromantic part of being an author: contracts. A writer may be so excited that someone wants to publish the book that it becomes easy to overlook what is being exchanged in return, including foreign rights, film rights, translation rights or future formats whose value may only become clear much later. Margrét’s advice is simple and practical: understand what you are signing. Through the Icelandic Writers’ Union, authors can compare agreements with an established model contract and identify terms that deserve closer scrutiny. Stories may come from instinct, but decisions about who controls their future deserve time, information and careful thought.
Politics also begins with a blank page
Toward the end of our conversation, Margrét connects two parts of her life that might initially seem far apart: writing novels and working in politics. Both require the ability to understand the world as it exists while also imagining how it could be different. A novelist begins with a blank page and gradually constructs an entire reality, and Margrét believes policymakers could benefit from approaching challenging systems with some of that same freedom. Instead of endlessly repairing what already exists, she asks what might happen if we occasionally cleared the table and asked a more fundamental question: if this system did not already exist, how would we design it today? Understanding reality tells us where we are, but imagination helps us decide where we might go next.
Find your own way
Our conversation closes where so many creative journeys eventually lead: finding your own voice. Margrét has worked with writers and visual artists, and she returns to the importance of developing a perspective that belongs to you. Influence can come from anywhere: another book, a conversation, the weather, someone you love, an experience that unsettles you, or something you suddenly understand differently. Perhaps that is why I kept thinking about her childhood habit of rereading. We return to the same stories and discover new things because we ourselves have changed, and writing may be the reverse: taking a world already full of stories and experiences, letting them pass through our own lives, and creating something that carries our particular way of seeing.
🎧 Listen to my conversation with Margrét Tryggvadóttir on Intangiblia, where we talk about childhood reading, writing for young audiences, copyright, streaming, authors’ contracts and why imagination belongs far beyond the pages of a book.
