Red Milk

WINNER OF THE SWEDISH ACADEMY’S NORDIC PRIZE 2023

A timely and provocative novel about a mysterious Icelandic neo-Nazi and the enduring global allure of fascism.

In England in 1962, an Icelandic man is found dead on a train bound for Cheltenham Spa. In his possession, policemen find a map on which a swastika has been drawn with a red pen. Who was he, and where was he going?

In a novel that reads as both biography and mystery, the internationally celebrated novelist Sjón tells the story of Gunnar Kampen, the founder of Iceland’s antisemitic nationalist party, with ties to a burgeoning network of neo-Nazi groups across the globe. Told in a series of scenes and letters spanning Kampen’s lifetime--from his childhood in Reykjavík during the Second World War, in a household strongly opposed to Hitler and his views, through his education, political radicalization, and final clandestine mission to England--Red Milk urges readers to confront the international legacy of twentieth-century fascism and the often unknowable forces that drive some people to extremism.

Based on one of the ringleaders of a little-known neo-Nazi group that operated in Reykjavík in the late 1950s and early 1960s, this taut and potent novel explores what shapes a young man and the enduring, disturbing allure of Nazi ideology.

Sjón is a celebrated Icelandic author whose novels have been published in more than thirty-five languages. He won the Nordic Council’s Literary Prize for The Blue Fox, and From the Mouth of the Whale was short-listed for both the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was received every literary prize in Iceland. CoDex 1962, a novel in three books written over twenty-five years, was published in Iceland in 2016 to great acclaim. Sjón has published more than a half dozen poetry collections and has written four opera libretti and lyrics for various artists. He is the president of the PEN International Icelandic Centre and lives in Reykjavik with his wife and two children.