intimacy with the authors has proved both popular and successful, making this event a regular part of the festival. A similar program has taken place at Reykjavík Culture Night in the past and authors have also been called upon in Reykjavík City Library's literary walks, as these visits seem to have a special appeal to guests.
other artists and fuse literature with different art forms. An example of this fusion is when Nýhil and the grassroots Crymo Gallery in Reykjavík collaborated on a program called What is Poetry? in 2010, where poets and visual artists switched roles and the result was a kind of poetry performance.
The International Children's Literature Festival has been held in Reykjavík every other year since 2001, and it has attracted numerous writers and scholars from different countries. The festival is organized by the Nordic House, Reykjavík City Library, IBBY Iceland, The Writer's Union of Iceland, SÍUNG (Association of Writers of Children's and Young Adult's Fiction) and the University of Iceland's School of Education. The festival caters to children and offers all sorts of events with Icelandic and foreign authors, readings, workshops, performances and exhibitions, but also hosts an academic program on children's literature for professionals and enthusiasts at the same time. There is a theme each time, examples are illustrated children's books, fantasy and myth in children's books and poetry and rhymes for children. The City of Reykjavík supports the festival and Reykjavík City Library is one of its hosts. Reykjavík primary schools and daycares take an active part by hosting programs with the writers at the schools and taking students to festival events. Writers visit schools in mixed groups of Icelandic and foreign authors, making the interaction with students across language barriers more fun and easy. Publishers also take part by sponsoring writers and publishing work by them, and bookstores promote their work with special offers, book-signings and other activities.
All these festivals are subsidized by The City of Reykjavík, but the City also presents its own annual festivals, organized by the Visit Reykjavík office. The biggest ones are Reykjavík Culture Night in August and the Winter Lights Festival and Museum Night in February. Even though Reykjavík City officially hosts these festivals, they are in fact grassroots festivals in which many individuals, institutions, and organizations contribute. Literature is always a part of the programs, with various events on offer by different parties, such as the Reykjavík City Library, local bookstores, publishers, writer associations and individual writers. Culture Night is the largest and best attended festival in the country, and in recent years it has attracted as many as 100.000 visitors to the city centre.
The International Poetry Festival, hosted by the grassroots movement Nýhil, has been a welcome addition to the festival landscape of Reykjavík in the past six years. This annual event has been making a name for itself during this time and seems to have already taken root, as the seventh festival is due to take place in the fall of 2010. The main objective of the festival is to support dialogue between Iceland and other countries, and to introduce progressive, contemporary poetry to Icelanders, and Icelandic poetry to foreign guests. The writers within Nýhil often work with
Reykjavík City held a Children's Culture Festival for the first time in April 2010, and the goal is to make this an annual event. Iceland's official First Day of Summer is celebrated at this time and so is the Week of the Book, but both events are traditionally dedicated to children and reading. The Children's Culture Festival focuses on all sorts of cultural activities with children and youths, and the city's daycares and primary schools systematically participate, along with cultural institutions. Among the events on offer this year was a cooperative program between the festival organizers, Reykjavík primary schools, publishers and Reykjavík City Library, where school classes “adopted” a writer. Six writers took part, each working with a class for a few weeks and at the end a joint exhibition was put up at Reykjavík City Hall.
Reykjavík – a City of Literature
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