Hilary Finch is chief music critic of The Times, but her consuming passion is for Iceland, a country she’s visited at least once a year for the past twenty-five years. She’s absorbed the culture, from the sagas to Sigur Ros, become acquainted with the people and explored the landscape of lava fields, glaciers and volcanoes.

In this portrait, she examines the energies that burst from the land – literally, in the form of geysirs and volcanic eruptions, and metaphorically, through Icelanders’ essential creativity. She talks to the former President, Vigdis Finnbogadóttir, about elves and economics, including the emergence during the recent crisis of the ‘kitchen-utensil-revolutionaries’ who call for a return to the values of the land and the home. And she meets some of Iceland’s most distinctive figures – among them, the Zen Buddhist monk, restauranteur and singer, Sverrir Gudjonsson and the reclusive artist Páll Guđmundsson, who prints portraits from painted ice and creates marimbas from stone gathered in the mountains behind his farmhouse.

Freezing Fire, Singing Stone is Hilary Finch’s personal portrait of Iceland - part travelogue, part biography, part confession of an enduring passion - and captures the sounds of geysirs and waterfalls in the mid-Atlantic rift valley alongside cultural testimonies and socio-political analysis.

"Although this was a feature at the poetic end of things, with lots of sound textures and atmosphere, it included the recent change in Icelandic fortunes, talking to a brilliant range of creative souls, each blessed with a winning turn of phrase. One man railed against what he called "the poverty of having everything", recalling the comparative simplicity of his childhood."

Elizabeth Mahoney, The Guardian, 13.04.09