Märta Tikkanen, whose work has strongly focused on equality and women’s rights over several decades, has been awarded a prize for her life’s work by the Kvinnosaksförbundet Unionen / Naisasialiitto Unioni, the Finnish branch of the International Alliance of Women.
The news has been published on Hufvudstadsbladet, the leading Swedish-language newspaper in Finland.
Tikkanen is a prolific and wildly successful author: The Love Story of The Century, a novel about the struggles of a woman whose husband falls into alcoholism, became an instant undisputed classic of Finnish literature on its debut in 1978 and has sold over 140.000 copies in Sweden alone.
She had already made waves with Manrape (1975), the story of a woman who decides to take revenge on her rapist. The book, now an established classic, was considered something of a scandal when it first came out, but has since paved the way for writing about gender and sexual violence in fiction.