The option is always on the table. When we [with Bjork] were starting as creative kids in the Eighties, we found each other. I was 19, she was 16 and a friendship was made.

I followed the launch of the library with Margaret Atwood and then David Mitchell. I just sat quietly at home secretly envying them. Then just over a month ago she asked me if I would like to be the third author to join the library.

A great number of tourists have been flocking Iceland and those numbers are growing every year. That also raises questions like "How do we receive people?" and "How do we present our country?"

I have to face questions like, "Do I simply write the best text I possibly can? Do I specifically engage with contemporary issues? 'Do I consciously try to write something that is timeless?"

I usually leave Reykavik for two to three weeks to go to the South Coast of Iceland where I have a small fisherman's hut from the beginning of the last century. That's where I sit down and do the actual writing. I might write for 16 hours a day or something. That's how it happens.

Literature acknowledges that life is complicated.

All authors secretly hope that their works will be read in 100 years' time and 200 years, and that they will somehow survive into the future.