Yrsa's work to be filmed
The German film company teamWorx secures film rights to all of Yrsa Sigurðardóttir's books. Meanwhile, she publishes her newest thriller.
The German film company teamWorx has secured the film rights for all of Yrsa Sigurðardóttir's novels from Veröld, her Icelandic publisher. teamWorx is the daughter company of FreemantleMedia, which is itself a subsidiary of Bertelsmann, one of the world's largest media companies.
“I've been a huge fan of Yrsa's, ever since I was introduced to her works,” says Benjamin Benedict, producer at teamworx. “I started out with her third book, then read her first, went on to number two and finally the fourth! But even though I didn't read them in the proper order, I really enjoyed the way she tells a story. I find her main protagonist, the lawyer Þóra Guðmundsdóttir, to be a fascinating character. I'm also quite taken with the settings – Icelandic nature, the country and its inhabitants. It's good movie material. We've already hired a scriptwriter and are working on financing the films, so everything's rolling along quite nicely. We're looking forward to taking on this challenging project of transferring Yrsa's stories to the silver screen.”
Yrsa's most recent outing, Ég man þig (Veins of Ice), is the story of a young couple who become entangled in a series of strange events related to the history of the decrepit house they are renovating, way out in the middle of nowhere in western Iceland.
The English version of Yrsa's My Soul to Take was nominated for the Shamus Prize in 2010. The book was published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2009, who followed up with Ashes to Dust in 2010.