Eliza Reid, First Lady of Iceland, is currently working on a book about Icelandic women’s struggle for equality, MBL reported yesterday afternoon. The book is scheduled to be published by Simon & Schuster in spring 2022. In the US it will be published by Sourcebooks, which is the largest female-owned publisher in North America. Eliza is a Canadian-Icelandic writer, who co-founded the Iceland Writers Retreat and has written freelance for multiple Icelandic magazines. She grew up in Canada and moved to Iceland in 2003.
The book will be titled ‘Secrets Of The Sprakkar: How The Incredible Icelandic Women Bring Us Closer to Gender Equality’. Eliza shared the details of this latest project of hers in a Facebook post yesterday. Explaining the title, she wrote that the word “sprakki” (pl. sprakkar) “is an ancient, obscure, but wonderful Icelandic word that means ‘outstanding / extraordinary woman’, and I’m excited to try and bring this term into more everyday usage.”
She added: “I’d like to emphasize that while I hope it’s an interesting, funny, positive and realistic portrayal of life in Iceland, it won’t be a myopic ‘Iceland is a gender paradise’ book. I have and will be speaking with dozens of women to tell this tale, as well as exploring my own experience as an Icelandic woman of foreign origin. I am really looking forward to sharing it with everyone in due course.”
More information is available on the website of the Transatlantic Agency, which suggests that the book will be popular amongst readers of Melinda Gates’s ‘The Moment of Lift’ and Michelle Obama’s ‘Becoming’.
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