Month: January 2021

In January, HLA is celebrating its 4th anniversary. We had our ups and downs along the way, but from the beginning, one thing has been consistently praised: our style. Our agents would hardly have a meeting where a publisher wouldn’t mention how elegant and beautiful our catalogue or logo is. The man behind it is one of the top typographers in Finland, Petri Latvala – someone who seems to have come straight out of a 19th century novel, somehow ending up in our time. For his 50th anniversary, we interviewed Petri about visual, literary, and existential things.

In January, HLA is celebrating its 4th anniversary. We had our ups and downs along the way, but from the beginning, one thing has been consistently praised: our style. Our agents would hardly have a meeting where a publisher wouldn’t mention how elegant and beautiful our catalogue or logo is. The man behind it is one of the top typographers in Finland, Petri Latvala – someone who seems to have come straight out of a 19th century novel, somehow ending up in our time. For his 50th anniversary, we interviewed Petri about visual, literary, and existential things.

Read the interview here and find out how typography is connected to philosophy and linguistics, what makes a good book cover, who is Petri’s favourite HLA-represented author and what does his favourite word – ματαιοπώγων – mean.

The Little Pike is up for an award in its native land! Juhani Karila’s hilarious novel is among the six nominees for the Lapland Literature Prize!

Lapland Literature Prize is given every second year for the best fiction title either set in Lapland or written by an author born in Lapland or currently living there. The prize is jointly funded by Lapland’s libraries. Additionally, the audience is invited to vote for their favourite among the nominees: the prize itself is 3000 euros and the winner of the public vote is rewarded a symbolic sum of 500 euros. Among the previous winners is a well-known Finnish author Rosa Liksom.

Last year’s dark horse, Fishing for the Little Pike won the prestigious Jarkko Laine Literature Prize, Kalevi Jäntti Literary Prize and Tähtifantasia Prize, and was nominated for the Tolkien Society in Finland Literary Prize.

Foreign rights have so far been sold to 6 territories, including German, World French and others, and in November, Juhani Karila was our podcast guest discussing myths in Finland and about Finland.

The winner of the prize will be announced on the 19th of March when we celebrate The Library Day!

Congratulations to the author and fingers crossed!

Despite the chaos caused by the pandemic, children’s literature has been doing extremely well all around the world – and it continues to be so!

We are thrilled to announce new foreign rights sales for the hilarious children’s verse book The Secret Life of Farts written by Malin Klingenberg and illustrated by Sanna Mander: French and German rights were acquired by Helvetiq in Switzerland!

Helvetiq is a quality publisher for which the design and humour are extremely important in the books – no wonder Klingeberg’s & Mander’s brilliant cooperation immediately caught their eye!

The sale makes it 8 foreign languages for this title altogether. Not long ago, the English edition came out in the UK, published by Pushkin Press and translated by Annie Prime.

Sincere congratulations to the authors and all the lucky readers!

We are extremely thrilled to announce that UK publisher Dedalus is acquiring the World English rights for the first two books in Karin Erlandsson’s fantasy series for the middle-grade readers The Song of the Eye Gemstone!

The captivating four-part series depicts a kingdom of stories, where the most powerful tale is the legend of the Eye Gemstone, the largest pearl of them all. But it is also an account of friendship, guts and longing – and how sometimes you have to travel far in order to discover that what matters most is close by.

The Pearl Fisher and The Victor – the first and the last books of the series – were nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2018 and 2020 respectively. The first book was also the winner of the prestigious Runeberg Junior Prize in 2018 and the nominee for the Children’s novel prize in Sweden. Here you can find a beautiful video of the author presenting the series and read an interesting short interview about Erlandsson’s inspirations.

Dedalus is a British publisher with almost forty years of publishing history, specialising in “its own distinctive genre, where the bizarre, the unusual, the grotesque and the surreal meld in a kind of intellectual fiction which is very European.” Erlandsson’s books will be published as a part of Young Dedalus series.

Congratulations to the author!