Sjón: I’m one of the few people who’ve had Björk as a backing singer

The Icelandic writer self-published poems at 15, was Oscar-nominated for his lyrics for Lars von Trier and gave Björk’s Sugarcubes a hit – but novels are his bedrock

The first thing I notice about Sjón is that he’s bleeding. As we shake hands outside a north London cafe, a bright-red drop beads on his upper lip, trembles for a moment, then spills. The sight is so surprising that it throws me completely: I exclaim; he apologises; we ditch the hellos and cast around for a tissue. He cut himself when he was shaving, he explains, hand held self-consciously to his mouth; just a nick, but sometimes they’re the worst. “Is it very bad?” he asks, with a mortified grimace. “Oh dear. Oh no. I’m so sorry.”

We are here to discuss Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was, Sjón’s 12th novel. Published in his native Iceland in 2013, it won him a clutch of prizes; the English translation, by his longtime collaborator Victoria Cribb, has just come out. Set in Reykjavik in 1918 over the course of three epoch-making months that saw the conclusion of the first world war and the ushering-in of Icelandic independence, it tells the story of Mani Steinn: a 16-year-old orphan, dyslexic, jobless and gay, who ekes out an existence on the edges of the city until the moment when the Spanish flu makes landfall, and its inhabitants begin to die. At under 150 pages, it’s a work of miniaturist perfection: a brief, brilliant jewel of a book in which each paragraph is precision-cut, each sentence burnished. But for all its intricacy, Moonstone poses questions about narrative – about the stories we choose to tell ourselves, and about ourselves – that extend far beyond its pages.

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