Hugi Guðmundsson was born in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1977. He studied composition at Reykjavik College of Music with Úlfar Ingi Haraldsson, Royal Danish Academy of Music with Hans Abrahamsen, Bent Sørensen and Niels Rosing-Schow and electronic music The Institute of Sonology, The Netherlands. Guðmundsson has received several awards and recognitions for his work, including multiple Icelandic Music Awards, nominations for the Reumert Awards and the Carl Prize, two nominations for the Nordic Council Music Prize and multiple recommendations at the International Rostrum of Composers.
In January 2015 he received the most prestigious award given to Icelandic artists, the Optimism Award, awarded to one artist a year by the president of Iceland. That same year he was awarded the biggest grant given to composers by the Danish Arts Council — a three-year work grant which is only awarded to one composer per genre.
His biggest works is the prize-winning and critically acclaimed oratorio The Gospel of Mary and the opera Hamlet in Absentia which has received several awards and nominations, including the Icelandic Music Awards, nomination for the Reumert Awards as the opera of the year in Denmark where it also won in two other categories. Furthermore the opera was nominated for the biannual composer awards at the Nordic Council Music Prize in 2018.
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