Published in 1992, ‘Night Watch’ (Icelandic: Meðan nóttin líður) is a novel by Icelandic author Fríða Á. Sigurðardóttir that won the ‘Nordic Council Literature Prize’ in 1992. Fríða Áslaug Sigurðardóttir was born in Hesteyri (Sléttuhreppur) and she graduated with a degree in Icelandic and literature in 1979. She worked as a librarian and teacher before her debut as a writer in 1980 with a collection of short stories: she subsequently published a number of novels and collections of short stories over the years, and also worked as a translator, translating works by Doris Lessing and Jean M. Auel into Icelandic. ‘Night Watch’ can be read as a family saga, but it also questions its own genre, its form being conventional least of all. Nina, the narrator of the novel, is a successful businesswoman in the advertising world, but when she sits at her mother’s deathbed she is also a woman harbouring the memories of the lives of four generations of women. These two levels of experience are combined in Nina’s story in a subjective and fragmented way but, at the same time, her memories and experience explain the contrasts between old female roles and modern ways of living. According to the Adjudicating Committee the novel is at once a bold, innovative and poetic beauty. The work goes back into the past searching for life values which have a message for our time: it takes place partly in the magnificent nature of northwest Iceland and the description of the countryside is part of its magic. The book does not attempt to give the illusion that we can fully understand our ancestors’ reality: it questions while also being experimental. In this book, Fríða Á. Sigurðardóttir lyrically describes our need for history and narrates and illustrates how difficult it is to trace a single truth about life and art.
