Max, you surely don't have a home, since you live in the mythical Biercian city of Carcosa.
This names thing is important. When looking things up on the English-speaking Wikipedia it won't matter a bit, but as you can see, the Icelanders maintain Icelandic name norms on their own
Icelandic Literature website. (You get a similar problem with Hungarian authors' names, as they always, in Hungary, put the surname first, contrary to the practice of the rest of Europe.)
My only problem with that Icelandic website is that there doesn't appear to be a kind of overview, pointing the outsider in the direction of trends and genres. Instead, all you get is a rather long list of undifferentiated authors' names.
However, what is incredibly positive about this same website is that it shows that amongst the rather small 300,000-strong population of present-day Iceland, there are present-day authors writing present-day books. The sagas will no doubt be frequently referred to in intertextual and reference terms in novels and poetry, but it would be a pity if people in Britain and America rushed off to find the classics and ignored all those authors listed on that website, i.e:
literature.is
I've just read a book with translations (into Dutch, which I read with ease) of five contemporary Icelandic poets. And I was impressed. The poets are:
Vigdís Grímsdóttir:
Vigdís Grímsdóttir
Ingibjörg Haraldsdóttir:
Ingibjörg Haraldsdóttir
Gerður Kristný [Guðjónsdóttir]:
Gerður Kristný
Steinunn Sigurðardóttir:
Steinunn Sigurðardóttir
Sigurbjörg Þrastardóttir:
Sigurbjörg Þrastardóttir
I'd never heard of any of them before, but I was impressed by what I read. I received the book through the post about a week before all this stock market and bank business, so this was not the reason for my getting interested in these poets. I got the book purely owing to the fact that I wrote a very small article about an Estonian author for a magazine, and got this book as payment.
The good thing about this anthology from my point of view is that you have the original one one page, the translation on a facing page. This means you get some idea of the sound and shape of the original poem. Why they chose five women poets, I do not know. But this anthology is not billed as poetry by five Icelandic
women poets, simply poetry by five Icelandic poets.
I have not yet read the afterword, which will no doubt enlighten me further.