Nolan’s Odyssey drives surge in Homer sales worldwide

Demand for Homer’s Odyssey has risen sharply since the release of British director Christopher Nolan’s new blockbuster, mbl.is reports. The film, which stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, premiered in Iceland on July 16 and has drawn audiences to cinemas around the world.

The film appears to have renewed interest in Homer’s epic, with many people in Iceland and abroad taking up the poem again or reading it for the first time.

Ari Gísli Bragason, an antiquarian bookseller and owner of Bókin, says interest in first editions of Homer’s works has increased following the renewed attention. He says the earliest Icelandic editions are difficult to find because they were not printed in large numbers.

“These books were, one might say, read to pieces,” Ari says. “The paper was naturally not very good, and they were read extensively. They have since become nearly 200 years old, and that tends to make them disappear.”

Eiríkur Ágúst Guðjónsson, an antiquarian bookseller and employee at Bókin, says there is no doubt that demand for the Odyssey increased after the film reached cinemas.

“More or less everything I had is gone,” he says. “Every autumn, students from MR come looking for Homer and the Odyssey. At that point, the books are nowhere to be found except with us, and even then we only occasionally have some old editions.”

He says more copies should be made available, while noting that the stories have always been popular.

The surge in interest has also been reported internationally. Nicole Vasquez, an employee at Books Are Magic, a bookshop in New York, told The Guardian that sales of Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey multiplied in July. She said demand increased dramatically as soon as the film was released.

Data from Circana BookScan, reported by Publishers Weekly, shows that sales of all printed editions of the Odyssey in the United States rose by 76% so far this year.

AFP reported at the end of July that interest in Homer’s epics had also increased in Britain. According to NielsenIQ research, sales of the Odyssey rose by 1,400% over the four weeks following the film’s mid-July release, compared with sales during the same period in 2025.