Month: February 2025

Heir to the Cotton Mill by Ann-Christin Antell is running for the Storytel Awards in Sweden. Antells’s latest work, Christmas at the Cotton Mill, is also running for the Storytel Awards in Finland.

Wonderful news for our romance readers: Heir to the Cotton Mill by Ann-Christin Antell, in translation by Mattias Huss, is running for the Storytel Awards in Sweden, in the category best novel. The nomination is based on the most listened to and highest rated titles on Storytel in 2024. You can find the nominee list, and vote for the book, here.

Heir To the Cotton Mill is the second instalment in the Cotton Mill Trilogy by Ann-Christin Antell. In it, Martta, Jenny’s foster daughter, returns to Turku after studying in Stockholm for years. She finds the city profoundly changed, and so is she: born to a working class family who lived in poverty, Martta has now become part of a wealthy and powerful family, and she struggles to find her place in the world and her social identity. To make matters even more complicated, she meets her childhood friend Juho after many years, and is drawn to him. At the same time she is also introduced to the dandy Robert, who welcomes her into the Turku social circles, and is attracted to him, too. Troubles lie ahead but thankfully a happy ending is in the cards.

The Cotton Mill Trilogy has been a wonderful success in Finland, where it sold over 200.000 copies, and the foreign rights have already been sold to five territories. Antell’s latest work, Christmas at the Cotton Mill, is also running for the Storytel Awards in Finland.

Antell’s works are published in Finland by Gummerus. In Sweden, they are published by Storytel.

Warmest congratulations to the author and the publisher, and fingers crossed!

Author Pirkko Saisio has been awarded the Vartio Award for her life’s work and her authorship as a whole.

Pirkko Saisio has been awarded the Vartio Award for her authorship and life’s work. The jury have highlighted that Saisio is being awarded for her innovative production, which has renewed the literary scene in Finland and continues to reach and speak to new generations.

The Vartio Award is awarded by the Haavikko Foundation to a Finnish author for their achievements in the field of literature and fiction.

The jury, consisting of journalist Anna-Liisa Haavikko, author Helena Ruuska, and publisher Urpu Strellman, have stated:

“In Finnish literature Saisio’s works form a unique, exceptionally multifaceted and unparalleled whole. The rhythm and breath in Saisio’s novels often consists of a narrative built on a short paragraph and of a movement between the interior and the exterior, the observed and the experienced. The reader is pulled onto the scene, into the shoes of the speaker and their observations and memories, in constant movement. When the text draws its breath space is made for the reader’s own experience. […]

Saisio’s autofictional trilogy – The Lowest Common Multiple (1998), The Backlight (2000), and The Red Book of Farewells (2003) – set the bar for autofiction already in a time, where no one spoke of autofiction yet. Now, a quarter of a century later, the trilogy is a part of world literature. In her most recent works, Passion (2021) and Suliko (2024) Saisio does something, that she’s done many times before – that is to say, she does something she’s never done before. Passion runs through history and centuries; it is a great European chronicle and a great adventure, whose mystery is man. In Suliko the protagonist is for the first time a real historical character. In these books a leitmotif that runs through Saisio’s production is brought to the fore: the investigation of what is the essence of the human life and the soul. Many of Saisio’s works have renewed and challenged the Finnish literary scene at the time of their publishing. Today they are a living whole, that has lasted time and that still speaks to new readers and new generations. This is the definition of a classic”.

In Finland, Saisio’s production is published by Siltala.

Warmest congratulations to the author!