To “walk with a book in your belly” is a translation of an Icelandic saying: It’s about the stories that live inside of us – not in our heads or hearts, but in our bellies, until we are ready to give birth to them. Eliza Reid ’98 shared a few of her own stories at Trinity in January during a filled-to-capacity Warren Lecture, titled “The Books in our Bellies.”
Reid is Canadian-born, raised on a hobby farm outside Ottawa, and a Trinity international relations graduate. After postgraduate study at Oxford, she moved to Iceland, built an English-language writing life, and co-founded the Iceland Writers Retreat in 2014. From 2016–2024 she served in the unofficial role of First Lady of Iceland. Since then, she has published the nonfiction bestseller Secrets of the Sprakkar (2022) and her debut crime novel (also a bestseller!), Death on the Island (2025), with a memoir, The First Lady Next Door, coming in 2026.
Her return to Trinity was timed around the 2026 Warren Lecture, but the reason people showed up was simpler: Reid has interesting things to say about voice, visibility, and what it takes to stay yourself when the world expects you to play a part. On this visit, she also toured the new Lawson Centre with Trinity Assistant Provost Jonathan Steels and led a writing masterclass for Trinity students.
The Trinity friends who still know “Eliza”
One of the easiest ways to tell whether a place still belongs to you is to see what happens when you walk into a room. For Reid, the answer was immediately obvious in the filled-to-capacity Seeley Hall. Friends from her Trinity years were in the Warren Lecture audience, and more were reaching out as word spread that she was in town.
Some of Reid’s closest Toronto-based Trinity friends had also made plans to meet up later in the week. At the Q&A after her lecture, she joked, “Nobody I know too well is allowed to ask a question.” It was a familiar kind of moment — and an easy reminder of how those friendships took root at Trinity in the first place.
In 2017, when Trinity magazine interviewed her shortly after her husband’s election, Reid described student life with the kind of energy that suggests she didn’t so much attend university as inhabit it: She lived at St. Hilda’s, sang in the chapel choir, played intramural football, helped with the yearbook, was co-president of the Trinity College Dramatic Society, and served as Head of College. The activities were varied, but the impulse behind them was consistent — show up, take responsibility, make something happen.
Seven weeks in 2016
In early 2016, Reid’s daily ambitions were not grand. They were the modest, meaningful wins familiar to anyone raising a family while trying to keep a professional life intact: meeting deadlines, managing clients, and growing the writers’ retreat she was building. She and her husband were raising their four children (their family also includes an older stepdaughter who was already living on her own).
Then her husband, Guðni Th. Jóhannesson, ran for president of Iceland — it was the first time he had sought elected office. Seven weeks later, he won.
Within months, Reid went from ordinary anonymity to the peculiar visibility of a head of state’s spouse — a role both public and undefined, with expectations attached and no formal job description to meet them.
No handbook — and no interest in being ornamental
What Reid describes, both in public talks and in conversation, is not the glamour of state dinners but the psychological strangeness of being recast. In a 2019 TEDx talk, she put it plainly: “All of a sudden it was like I was no longer Eliza. I was the president’s wife — the first lady.”
People often stopped asking about her work. They asked about clothes. They asked about the children. Sometimes they asked nothing at all, assuming she would appear automatically at her husband’s side, as if she were an accessory he could pick up on the way out the door.
Reid is careful with this material. Iceland’s presidency is non-partisan, and she is clear-eyed about the privilege of her position and the limits of her authority. She wasn’t elected. She didn’t want to pretend otherwise. But she also didn’t want to vanish into a role built on outdated expectations.
So she did what she had always done: She defined the job on her own terms.
That meant choosing the work that mattered to her and declining what didn’t. It meant speaking rather than smiling silently. It also meant finding small, pointed ways to resist the performance pressure that attaches itself so stubbornly to women in public view. In that same TEDx talk, she described borrowing clothes, buying second-hand, and wearing inexpensive pieces to formal events — not as a stunt, but as a way of signalling values: sustainability, practicality, and a refusal to equate worth with price tags.
The deeper point, though, isn’t about wardrobe or protocol. It’s about authorship. Who gets to tell the story of your life — and how do you insist on being a full person inside someone else’s narrative?
Becoming a writer by accident
Reid is down to earth, and easy to talk to — especially about the parts of a career that don’t look tidy in retrospect. She didn’t grow up with a single-minded plan to become a writer. What she did have, she says, was a family that treated language as a kind of daily practice. Her father taught English. Her mother was an everyday storyteller. Her youngest brother, Iain, is a writer, too.
Over time, writing became what she did. Not in one dramatic leap, but through accumulated work: the assignments that were available, then the assignments she could do well, then the steady confidence that comes from meeting deadlines and building craft. In Iceland, she found a niche as an English-language editor and writer — work that drew on discipline more than on any romantic notion of authorship.
Building a home for stories in Iceland
Reid often speaks about Iceland as a storytelling culture, one where literature has long been taken seriously — not as a luxury but as a way a small nation has understood itself. In her 2017 Trinity interview, she described a country where books remain the dominant Christmas gift, where authors do readings in unexpected places, and where the sagas still form a deep cultural root system.
The Iceland Writers Retreat, which marks its 12th year in April 2026, grew naturally from that environment. It also reflects a distinct kind of leadership, one that Reid first started to hone as a Trinity student — the ability to convene people around a shared project, and to create conditions where other people can do meaningful work.
Writing the next chapter
Over the past few years, Reid has stepped more fully into her identity as an author.
Her nonfiction book, Secrets of the Sprakkar (2022), drew international attention for its exploration of Icelandic women and the cultural forces that helped shape one of the world’s most gender-progressive 4societies.
Her debut crime novel, Death on the Island (2025), is Reid’s first foray into the world of fiction, where she can build a story around what’s hidden as much as what’s said out loud. Described as an atmospheric, fast-paced Agatha Christie-style plot within a modern “Nordic Noir” setting, the book has also been optioned for a six-part miniseries, currently in development.
Next up: Reid’s memoir, The First Lady Next Door (forthcoming 2026). Its premise is part fish out of water, part fairy tale: Reid highlights moments on her journey from rural Ontario to Icelandic state visits, as a writer and mother catapulted into a spotlight she never sought with protocol lessons occasionally learned via Google. But the heart of the book, as Reid frames it, isn’t the glamour of palaces or red carpets. It’s the quieter question of selfhood — how to keep your own work and your own voice intact when the world expects polished perfection.
Memoir, she says, isn’t about recording everything. “I shouldn’t write the A to Z of my life,” she laughs — and then makes the serious point behind the joke: you go deep in some places, skim past others, and choose what matters. In the end, she believes, “we’re vessels for stories.” When Reid returned to Trinity, the old stories surfaced quickly: friends in the room, friends waiting for dinner, and the kind of shorthand that only long friendships can sustain. And in her Warren Lecture, she offered her clearest case for putting those stories into words: “Our stories help us to navigate unexpected change, recognize new possibilities in our own lives, and inspire others.” It’s a compelling reason to keep telling them.
