Karin Altenberg

Karin Altenberg was born and brought up in southern Sweden. She moved to Britain to study in 1996 and holds a PhD in Archaeology. Altenberg’s first novel, Island of Wings, published by Quercus in the UK in 2011 and by Penguin US and Anansi in Canada in 2012, was nominated for the Orange Prize, the Saltire Award and the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Award. Her second novel Breaking Light was published in the UK in 2014, and in the US in 2016. She is a reviewer of fiction and non-fiction and a published translator of poetry, non-fiction and fiction from Swedish into English.

Praise for Breaking Light (2014)

‘Breaking Light is a gripping and extraordinary story. I haven’t found myself so absorbed, so involved and so satisfied by a work of fiction for a long time. This is a novel that will still be read in twenty or thirty years.’ Michael Holroyd

‘I urge you to read this fascinating, beautiful book… Karin Altenberg’s intense, disturbing writing, in which every shimmering sentence speaks the deep truth about all the things that matter… A gripping and extraordinarily touching story… A wonderful love story… Exquisite.’ Country Life

‘An intricately woven back-story about family legacy… Altenberg has a knack for gleaming description… Haunting and intimate.’ Sunday Herald

‘Karin Altenberg’s second novel Breaking Light is marvellous. It tells a gripping story of childhood damage and adult putting-to-rights. Every sentence shimmers with beauty and wisdom.’ Spectator

‘[Altenberg] posses an acute grasp of the courage needed for an aging mind to open itself... for all the novel's despair, it's born up by conviction that things once broken can be restored… Fine painterly evocations of the isolated setting.’ Wall Street Journal

Praise for Island of Wings (2011)

‘Island of Wings captures a world that disappears in the act of description, and the love, so inescapable and elusive, of the outsiders who try to tame it. With scrupulous attention to place, history and the natural world, it tells a story washed by a clean and lovely kind of sorrow.’ Anne Enright

‘[A] beautiful story of love and loss among the dark sea cliffs of St Kilda. The book tastes wonderfully of its own weather, of sea salt on the tongue, and I read it with a rising sense of appreciation. Island of Wings is a precise, subtle, spiritually alive debut.’ Andrew O’Hagan

‘It isn’t easy for a contemporary writer to get inside a Calvinist mind, or to depict how people could live with any dignity in such a primitive place... By respecting the details of religious history and the natural world, Altenberg does both beautifully.’ Ian Jack, Guardian

‘In her powerfully imagined debut, Karin Altenberg has delivered a post-colonial novel set not in Africa, Asia or Australia but at the edge of the British Isles.’ Boyd Tonkin, Independent

‘[Altenberg’s] literary achievement is astonishing. Her debut novel, elegantly written in impeccable English – her second language – is as remarkable for the shimmering quality of her prose as for her recreation of the brutal realities and grinding poverty of life on the isolated archipelago of St Kilda in the 1830s... Brilliantly captures the sublime, terrible beauty of the islands... A superb book.’ Scotsman

‘Karin Altenberg’s St Kilda novel Island of Wings is haunting. I read it in June on Colonsay, and hardly dare re-read it.’ James Fergusson, Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year

‘Deeply entrenched in historical detail... a moving portrait... the story shows the limits of love and devotion – in people and in faith.’ Publishers Weekly

‘A heartbreaking tale, based on fact, about a minister and his restless wife sent to a remote island to save souls – perhaps at the cost of their own.’ Chicago Tribune, Books of the Year