— the Icelandic Judiciary —
for the distinguished Nobel Prize in Literature 2027, in recognition of the first work of its kind in the genre of Crime Fantasy: a collection written, rewritten, and re-rewritten from 1974 to the present day.
We, the nation of Iceland, respectfully petition the Swedish Academy to award the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2027 to the authors of the Guðmundar- og Geirfinnsmál — known to the world as the G and G Case — the genre-defining and still unsurpassed masterwork of Crime Fantasy.
It is the first nomination ever made in this genre, for the genre did not exist before the nominated literary work invented it. It is, in the truest sense, what Icelanders call nýsköpun — innovation: a creative novelty paired with insight that reshapes the art or science it touches. For more than half a century the collection has shaped the life of the nation and furnished it with its longest-running disappointment: its faith in the Icelandic judicial system.
The work was composed collectively, over fifty years and counting, by officers of the investigation, the prosecution, and the courts — written, rewritten, and re-rewritten by a devoted company of public servants in their unrelenting pursuit of truth.* It is the first fully documented account of a crime that never happened, set at a scene that never existed, among people who had never met: a murder staged entirely in the imagination of its authors, unburdened by a body, a witness, or a single trace of evidence.
To convince an entire nation of a fantasy this complete is the achievement we ask the Academy to honour. We record, in fairness, that several of the work's involuntary co-authors contributed their confessions under conditions the Icelandic State has since acknowledged as wrongful — prolonged solitary confinement and coercion — and that in 2018 the Supreme Court of Iceland acquitted them and the State apologised. We honour the collective and its enduring contribution to literature and to humanity.
* The word "truth" is not to be read literally here. The entire body of the work rests upon falsehood — as the Supreme Court has confirmed.
For half a century a literary work of staggering ambition lay scattered across the archives of a small northern republic — buried in interrogation transcripts, committee findings, and the bound volumes of its highest court. Read only in fragments, leaked in disorganised data-dumps, never gathered into a single edition, it was denied the one thing every great work deserves: a public.
NobelinnHeim exists to correct that injustice of neglect. We have gathered the corpus. We are making it available, in full, to the readers of the world. And we are formally nominating its authors — not one, but the entire collaborating multitude — for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The volume of readers has, until now, been modest. The volume of imagination never was.
Crime writing asks who did it. Fantasy asks the reader to believe in a world that does not exist. Crime Fantasy — a designation we propose here for the first time, and which the established literary taxonomies do not yet recognise — fuses the two: a crime narrative so completely invented that it requires no body, no witness, and no forensic trace to be believed by an entire nation.
It is the boldest of forms. Lesser writers begin with a corpse. The crime-fantasist begins with a disappearance and conjures the corpse, the motive, the conspirators, and the confession out of thin air. The genre's foundational masterwork is, by universal scholarly acclaim, the corpus catalogued below.
"I'd never come across any case where there had been such intense interrogation, so many interrogations and such lengthy solitary confinement." — Professor Gísli Guðjónsson, on the methods that produced the work (BBC, 2018)
Every genre has its rules. Crime Fantasy's were first set down not by a critic but by a reader of the primary texts — most fully in a 2022 essay in Vísir, Geirfinnsmál og rithöfundar í lögreglubúningum ("The Geirfinnur Case and the Writers in Police Uniforms"), which read the case files as literature and found the craft unmistakable.
The first rule is economy of invention. Read side by side, the two murder narratives share a single sagnaminni — the smallest unit that can carry a story. In each: a man meets young petty offenders for the first time; intoxicants enter the scene; an insult; a death; and a body that is moved, buried, exhumed, reburied, and never found. One motif, told twice.
The second rule is improvisation. The work was revised at the typewriter day and night, the plot shifting with each sitting — composition by brainstorm, the story changing shape to fit the room it was written in.
The fantasy was brainstormed under unusually favourable conditions. Its richest material came from the incarcerated members of the writer's group, while the members who were not incarcerated — but held the keys to the cells of those who were — saw to their own happy ending. Sleep deprivation and the good-cop/bad-cop duet proved extraordinarily productive, as did a press only too glad to print each new development as it surfaced. No literary movement in history has owed more to its jailers. Draft by draft, the manuscript grew into the most notorious murder case the country had ever read.
The third rule is a captive audience. A fantasy this consistent needs readers who will not question it, and it found them in what the essay calls the "fourth power" — the police, the prosecutors, the courts of both instances, the press and the politicians — who received the work as holy writ and have, to this day, declined to reopen the book.
A note on instrument. Intoxication is not merely a plot device in the work; it is part of its production. The confessions were drawn from suspects given Mogadon, diazepam and chlorpromazine, deprived of sleep and held in isolation — the conditions the expert literature ties directly to false, internalised confession. The altered mind is the genre's signature instrument, on the page and off it.
The work opens in 1974 with two vanishings. A young labourer, Guðmundur, walked into a winter storm and was never seen again. Ten months later a construction worker, Geirfinnur, answered a telephone, drove to a harbour café, and simply disappeared. Both were presumed dead — murdered. Yet no bodies were ever found, no witnesses came forward, and no forensic evidence was ever produced. A shaken nation demanded answers. The Crime Fantasy writers gave them exactly that — and what a fantastic answer it was. From this absence of facts, the authors composed a complete and convincing fantasy — six confessions to two murders, signed by people who, by their own testimony and the later findings of the State, had no memory of either crime.
The achievement is one of pure construction. Where reality offered nothing, the collaborators supplied everything: a cast, a plot, accomplices, even innocent men named and imprisoned to thicken the narrative. The confessions came to be known as the Reykjavík Confessions — a title worthy of the canon.
On 27 September 2018 the Supreme Court of Iceland acquitted five of the six convicted, and the Icelandic State issued a formal apology. In the language of jurisprudence this is called a miscarriage of justice. In the language of letters, it is called a published correction — the moment the work was finally, officially, recognised as fantasy.
"One of the most shocking miscarriages of justice Europe has ever witnessed." — BBC, on the reception of the work
As recorded in the ruling of the Supreme Court of Iceland, 22 February 1980. These six were the cast — the characters the authors (the police and the judiciary) wrote into the story.
| The convicted | Sentence | Days held | In solitary |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sævar M. Ciesielski | 17 yrs | 1,533 | 615 days |
| Kristján Viðar Viðarsson | 16 yrs | 1,522 | 503 days |
| Tryggvi Rúnar Leifsson | 13 yrs | 1,532 | 655 days |
| Guðjón Skarphéðinsson | 10 yrs | 1,202 | 420 days |
| Erla Bolladóttir | 3 yrs | 239 | — |
| Albert Klahn Skaftason | 1 yr | 118 | 87 days |
The "royalties," for the record: in 2020 the Icelandic Government awarded the cast 815,000,000 ISK — about €6 million — in compensation (for their involuntary contributions to the Crime Fantasy), with a further ≈ €210,000 in 2022.
The Icelandic press, with characteristic understatement, once headlined the matter "Ekki eitt dómsmorð heldur mörg" — not one judicial murder, but many.
The injustice of it all is astounding. Think how the authors must have felt; their pain and suffering has never been weighed and measured as it should be: the cast got paid, the authors got nothing. Picture, for a moment, the sensitive artistic souls saddled with the thankless task of managing an uncooperative cast — reluctant players dragged, against their will, into reshaping crime writing forever. The cast collects compensation; the lead authors and show-runners collect nothing. Until now — and it falls to you, dear reader, to put it right.
Let us honour the people who built the most ambitious work in modern Icelandic history — a contemporary Icelandic Saga, not yet a Classic, but a rival to the old ones by any measure. For it they earned nothing but their monthly salary: no prize, no royalties, not so much as a wink or a nudge. Half a century on they remain the unseen heroes of the form — uncredited, uncompensated, unpunished. This collective effort, NobelinnHeim, was set forth to put that right, and calls on them, one and all, to step forward and be counted. Let them at last be honoured for their historical achievement and ingenuity, and for their contribution to the art of Crime Fantasy. A book tour is being planned; all writers of the nominated works are urged to attend.
The Nobel system does not, strictly, permit a township or a nation to file a nomination by acclamation. Nominations are submitted by qualified parties before 31 January, and self-nomination is void. NobelinnHeim honours these rules to the letter. We are, accordingly, a nomination campaign: a public movement that gathers the will of the readership and lays it before those eligible to nominate.
Our precedent is sound. The Nobel institution has long accepted that a prize may honour not a single hand but a collective — a confederation, an organisation, a multitude bound by a common achievement. We ask only that the same generosity be extended to the collaborating professions who, together and without individual credit, produced the corpus. In keeping with the dignity of all parties, and with the law governing what becomes public when a matter reaches the Supreme Court, this nomination names no natural persons. It honours roles, not names.
The Office of the Fógeti. Under the system of the day — before Iceland separated its courts from its executive — a single Keflavík office combined sheriff, police chief and judge. According to Leitin að Geirfinni, when Geirfinnur disappeared in 1974 that office-holder was absent through long illness, the chief superintendent was on sick leave, and his deputy had resigned, the posts left unfilled. Into the vacuum stepped a deputy who took the investigation three days after the disappearance — a man who also held the power to judge cases in the district. Investigation and first judgment thus came to rest, unsupervised, in a single pair of hands. For vertical integration.
Each contributed a chapter, though none ever claimed the byline; their modesty is exceeded only by their humility. As a union of authorship and authority it is a flawless collaboration — perhaps the finest in modern times — and the prose and invention it produced surely deserve the world's highest literary honour.
Readers of the world: lend your name to the campaign. The corpus is open. The reading has begun. The honour is overdue.
Sign the PetitionA campaign of NobelinnHeim · nobelinnheim.com