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!