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Halldór Kiljan Laxness (Icelandic: [ˈhaltour ˈcʰɪljan ˈlaksnɛs] (listen); born Halldór Guðjónsson; 23 April 1902 – 8 February 1998) was an Icelandic writer and winner of the 1955 Nobel Prize in Literature. He wrote novels, poetry, newspaper articles, essays, plays, travelogues and short stories. Writers who influenced Laxness included August Strindberg, Sigmund Freud, Knut Hamsun, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, Bertolt Brecht and Ernest Hemingway.

Halldór Guðjónsson was born in Reykjavík in 1902. When he was three his family moved to the Laxnes farm in Mosfellssveit parish. He was brought up and enormously influenced by his grandmother who "... sang me ancient songs before I could talk, told me stories from heathen times and sang me cradle songs from the Catholic era... " He started to read books and write stories at an early age and attended the technical school in Reykjavík from 1915 to 1916. His earliest published writing appeared in 1916 in the children's newspapers Æskan and Sólskin, the latter being a part of the North American Icelandic newspaper Lögberg, as well as in Morgunblaðið. Laxness then attended and graduated from the Reykjavík Lyceum in the spring of 1918. By the time his first novel, Barn náttúrunnar (Child of Nature), was published in 1919, he had already begun his travels on the European continent.