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Kristjana Gunnars was born in Iceland and has lived in Canada since 1969. She served as Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, and as Guest Professor at the University of Trier in Germany and the University of Iceland. She lived on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia for twenty years while pursuing a career in the arts (painting), as well as writing. She is the author of numerous books (see websites kristjanagunnars.com and kristjanagunnarswritings.com for details). Her latest books are TheScent of Light (Coach House, Toronto) and Ruins of the Heart(Angelico, New York). She has published a number of chapbooks, the latest being 112th Street Notebook (akinoga, Baltimore) and At Home in the Mountains (Junction, Toronto). Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals in Canada, the U.S., and Europe.
""Gunnars’ prose circles, arcs, triangles, and shape-shifts through The Silence of Falling Snow, her “anti-memoir” or detour from any fixed path."" – Michael Greenstein, The Seaboard Review of Books ""Gunnars shines in her ability to offer taxonomies of experience, especially mourning and loneliness. She is an articulate explorer of compassion and the strange lands occasioned through sudden loss."" – Jarett Myskiw, The Winnipeg Free Press ""What do we know about what we don't know? What are we willing to not-know about what we think we know? Kristjana Gunnars has always been a writer willing to write in between and through genres to find her way into the bewildering space of true inquiry. She invokes Agamben's description of that shocked gaze in figures of murals from Pompeii as a figure for the writer confronting the literally ""unspeakable"": human experience of the profoundest grief. Using a range of touchstones, including films, literature, painting, sculpture, theology, philosophy, the history of the city of Oslo and the ancient Pali canon of Buddhist teachings, as well as a searing interrogation of trauma and tragedy in her own life, Gunnars confronts, interrogates, and illuminates the excruciating relational networks between grief and the creative life."" – Kazim Ali, author of Indian Winter ""In her quietly powerful ""anti-memoir"" Kristjana Gunnars refuses ""to give a description of feelings and events."" She sets out to write a ""book of snow"" and succeeds."" – Martha Baillie, author of There is No Blue Praise for The Scent of Light: ”These novels are meant to be experienced, not just in language, but in their rhythms, in their interruptions and silences, in their structures and patterns and shapes of thought … These books do not merely depict life nor tell about lives lived by characters outside the writer or the reader. They are themselves alive. And in them a reader comes to life.” – Kazim Ali, from the introduction ”Gunnars questions what writing accomplishes when memory and emotions are fleeting, in her sophisticated omnibus of autofiction and literary criticism.” – Publishers Weekly ”I was smitten with the simple, lyrical ruminations on Kierkegaard and Cixous, being a 'fickle unfaithful reader,' window shutters and obituaries, all against a backdrop of heated arguments with her lover.” – Marcie McCauley, Chicago Review of Books ”Kristjana Gunnars’s The Scent of Light is a work unyielding in its sensuality, uniquely attuned to the slippery nature of reading in the Information Age.” – Dashiel Carrera, Rain Taxi Review of Books
