Testimonials

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I would highly recommend Alda Sigmundsdóttir as a speaker. Alda spoke to my university students while we were studying in Iceland. Her experience as an Icelander who has lived abroad extensively allows her to provide an ideal perspective for people interested in learning about contemporary Iceland. Whether she was telling about some of the unique aspects of Icelandic culture or describing current political controversies, she kept the students engaged and led an informative discussion. My students rated our time with her as one of their favorite aspects of our trip and I would agree. Working with Alda was a real treat, she is easy-going and uncomplicated. I will definitely invite her to speak again with my next group.

Brack Hale
Associate Professor of Biology and Environmental Science
Franklin University Switzerland
[see also here.]

I am a British crime novelist writing a series set in Iceland.  I employed Alda to read through and check the details and verisimilitude of one of my Icelandic novels, Sea of Stone.  She did the job extremely well with reliability, accuracy, attention to detail and professionalism.  More importantly she knows Iceland as well as anyone who has lived there all their lives, yet can also understand the perspective of the outsider, which was exactly the skill I needed.

Ever since I wrote my first Icelandic novel in 2009 I have been an avid reader of Alda’s Facebook page, blog and “Little Book of Icelanders”.  She is a shrewd observer of Icelandic culture and people and has a deep knowledge of its politics and economics.  There are a few others who can explain Iceland to English speakers, but none with quite the insight and accuracy of Alda.  She writes good, clear grammatical English, and is sensitive to the nuances of English and American (and Canadian) usage.

Michael Ridpath
www.michaelridpath.com

As an analyst covering Europe’s economies and markets from 2005 until 2010, I looked into my fair share of crises. Alda’s work was an absolutely invaluable resource when it came to Iceland. Not only did Alda keep me abreast of important developments (well before they might hit the newspapers an outsider would read) – but her analytical and rigorously independent approach gave me the proper context in which to assess these developments. What happened in Iceland before, during and after the crisis was complex – it was economic financial, societal, international. Alda’s view is never narrow; she put the pieces together for me – and I would highly recommend her to anybody interested in Iceland.

– Jon Levy

* The views expressed in this testimonial are my own and do not represent my employer’s views

Alda helped me a few years ago with research on a book that contained a chapter on Iceland. Not only did she prove to be an outstanding researcher and articulate expert on the topic of Iceland, its politics, its culture and its economy, but she was not afraid to step in and tell me when she thought I had something wrong — not facts so much as tone and emphasis. So thorough is her knowledge of all things Iceland, especially the soul of the place, that she was able to chime in with just the right perspective.

Katie Hafner
www.katiehafner.com

My book Overconnected contained a chapter on the Icelandic financial crisis.  I wanted to be sure that every detail was correct and that I represented what happened from an Icelandic point of view with 100% accuracy.  I could not have done that without Alda’s extremely responsive support and her willingness to identify my misconceptions.  The result is that the chapter was the most frequently cited portion of the book.

William Davidow, writer and entrepreneur
Mohr Davidow Ventures, Menlo Park, CA