Creative writing student’s Sudoku puzzle: Blekfjelag’s Christmas book to be published for the tenth time

Creative writing students at the University of Iceland have for the past few years gotten the complicated assignment to write short stories, constricted to a certain word count. The creative writing student’s Christmas book is launching in the middle of December and each short story in the book has to be exactly 91 words.

The creative writing master’s program was first available at UI in 2008 and quickly became popular. This spring, media outlets wrote stories about how it was getting as tough to get into the program as it is to get into medical studies, famous for its strict admission requirements. Many speculators of the literature business are thankful for the program, as it has been producing a lot of quality manuscripts for the last few years. It’s evident that the program is benefitting cultural society.

Creative writing students’  Christmas book has come out annually for the past 10 years, so this year is especially festive. In the first one, each story had to be exactly 100 words and each year, the word count decreases by one word. This time, as stated earlier, there are 91 words left.

This year, the theme of the book is “porridge”. Helgi Grímur Hermansson, one of the organizers of the launch, says that even though the team spends the majority of the semester writing and editing the short stories, one of the main characteristics of the books is playfulness. Everyone does their best, but they don’t take it too seriously.

For as long as anyone can remember crafts and quality time have been a part of the advent. Helgi says that Blekfjelag’s Christmas book can be considered a type of Christmas craft: a Sudoku puzzle of the emerging Icelandic authors. There are about 30 short stories in total, and even though the theme is “porridge”, the stories are very different. The theme is only supposed to be motivation, and the authors of the stories sometimes end up with something completely unrelated to it.

Berglind Erna Tryggvadóttir designed the cover of the bok, but she is a creative writing student. The organizers of the launch are: Birna Stefánsdóttir, Berglind Ósk Bergsdóttir, Helgi Grímur Hermannsson and Sunneva Kristín Sigurðardóttir. Blekfjelagið, the creative writing’s student organization, is the publisher.

The book, which is called Grautur (e. Porridge), will be available in all the major book stores. It’ll launch on December 16th, and that same day, Blekfjelagið is throwing a launch party at 17:00 in the Salka bookstore.