Do we like them?

Do we like Halldór Laxness?

Our score: 7 out of 10. A writer who championed ordinary people, marked down for defending Stalin's Soviet Union in the 1930s before he turned on it.

Halldór Laxness was born near Reykjavík in 1902, started writing as a teenager and had his first novel published at seventeen. By the time he died in 1998 he had written more than sixty further books. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955, with the Swedish Academy citing a “vivid epic power which has renewed the great narrative art of Iceland”. He's still Iceland's only Nobel laureate.

The big stain is Stalin. A review of a novel about him says he visited Moscow in 1937 to attend the purge trials, and that by his own later admission he misrepresented them for fear of offending the Soviet government. That's not a small thing, and plenty of writers of his generation fell for the same line. What matters for us is that he didn't stay there.

On the harm test, here's the honest summary. His writing defended a regime that was killing its own people, and that's a real mark against him. After the 1950s he moved away from it, and a review of his biography says his communist views and his opposition to an American army base got him blacklisted in the US during the Cold War. I found nothing from him aimed at LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet, but the record I could open is thin, so treat this as a lean-on-the-evidence call.

The Irish Times review of Halldór Guðmundsson's biography also says the Icelandic government withheld a writer's grant from him in 1946 over his politics. Whatever you think of his politics, that's him paying a price for his stance rather than cashing in on it. It's a small point in his favour, but it's there.

The good stuff is in the books. *Independent People* (1939) follows a poor sheep farmer and his family through hunger and hardship in a turf cottage, and one reviewer reads the stubborn pride at its centre as something that costs the family dearly, not as heroism. That's a writer looking hard at poverty and at who pays for a man's pride, and Icelanders still read him for it.

I found no court record or allegations against him, and no accounts of him mistreating anyone. The only legal matters that turned up were over his legacy, and he was not the defendant in them. Gaps: I couldn't open a full interview or his Nobel speech, so his own words aren't in the evidence file below.