Heida Ásgeirsdottír Icelandic farmer biography bestseller | Tim Adams
Heida Ásgeirsdottír gave up a potential career on the catwalk to look after the family farm in Iceland, Now, 21 years on, her life story has become a bestseller
Our age of shifting complication is drawn to myths of rooted simplicity. Which city dweller, navigating between shallow digital profiles, could not be moved by the idea of a woman, once briefly a model in New York, who wanted nothing more than to run a sheep farm at one of the world’s furthest corners, and to save the valley she grew up in from imminent peril?
That is the modern Icelandic saga of Heida Ásgeirsdottír, who, at the age of 20 gave up on a potential career on the catwalk – she had been press-ganged into it by scouts and photographers, and by a fairy-godmother aunt who worked at the Elite model agency – to return home for lambing season; to become, as a recently published book of her life has it: “A shepherd at the edge of the world.” Twenty-one years later, she says she has never for a day regretted it.