DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Quentin Bates Translator & Author

Quentin Bates made his escape from suburbia at the end of the seventies as a gap year turned into a gap decade spent in the north of Iceland. He worked ashore and at sea before returning to England and, once finally ashore for good, drifted by accident into journalism. Finally the lure of fiction became too strong to resist. Sergeant Gunnhildur and the series of novels she features in have their origins in a deep affection for Iceland and its people, and an intimate knowledge of Icelandic society and its language, customs and quirks. Today he divides his time between the north of Iceland and the south of England, translating books from Icelandic in addition to working on his own fiction.