Hildur Guðnadóttirm, the musician who composed the score for hit HBO series Chernobyl, has been nominated for an Emmy.

The Chernobyl disaster, as it has now been well documented, was a catastrophic nuclear accident that occurred in 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The incident still remains to this day the most disastrous nuclear power plant accident in history.

HBO’s historical miniseries was created and written by Craig Mazin who worked in collaboration with director by Johan Renck. The miniseries, based in large part on the recollections of Pripyat locals, uses information told by Belarusian Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich in her book Voices from Chernobyl. The series focuses heavily on mistakes made by government officials, a decision which has been heavily criticised by a Russian Communist Party who have called for the show to be banned in the country.

The show has become a critical and commercial success, not least ranking as one of the greatest television series of all time by voters on ranking site IMDb. Now, its creators are enjoying some of the acclaim in response, notably Icelandic composer Guðnadóttirm who has been nominated for an Emmy.

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Taking her commitment to the role seriously, Guðnadóttirm took the decision to visit the shooting location herself in order to record audio samples of the area. “I wanted to explore what a nuclear disaster sounds like – to go into the plant, put on the gear, walk through the huge spaces, smell how it smells,” she told Iceland Review. “Often film music is boosting the emotion on the screen But because the events at Chernobyl were so devastating in themselves, I found it was really important that I wasn’t exaggerating anything with thriller music or dramatic strings, I wanted to approach the music very honestly.”

“You arrive and you have to put on these Soviet uniforms and hats and so on,” she explained a recent interview. “Being able to spend a few days in the lives of the people who work in these environments is phenomenal. They spend their days taking it all apart, and have been doing for 15 years or so. It was really inspirational to go there.”

[MORE] – The haunting view of Pripyat, Chernobyl, caught by drone footage