The Ribbon Bow by Anu Kaaja has been nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize 2025.
The Ribbon Bow by Anu Kaaja has been nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. This is fantastic news for this title, already nominated for the Runeberg Prize, the Adlibris Award and the Most Beautiful Book of the Year Award. The Nordic Council Literature Prize is a prestigious yearly award founded in 1962 and aiming at fostering interest in the literature and the language of Nordic countries.
The jury have commented on this title: “The story employs three different styles: auto-fictional material, magical realism, and art essayistics. It merges lightness and seriousness, pleasure and suffering, thought and play. In the novel, surreal conversations take place with objects, and life’s porous nature is explored through reflections on friendship and relationships. The reading experience is an aesthetic delight, and the ever-present bow – bow row rococo – serves as a symbol whose beauty, devoid of meaning, illustrates the exercise of power in society. Human relationships with objects are contemplated in an exuberantly sensual way, and the stories reify people while humanising things.”
The Ribbon Bow follows a heartbroken writer who sets out on a European trip in the style of the Grand Tour, visiting museums and enjoying art. The writer’s wanderings bring a fresh, at times irreverent perspective on some of the world’s most famous works of art and is a razor-sharp criticism of capitalism and the objectification of humans at the expense of the humanisation of objects. Everyday objects, like a bow, a coffee cup and a napkin, come to life and engage in conversation, while the human characters are difficult to reach and even harder to let go of. In Finland, The Ribbon Bow is published by Kustantamo S&S.
Anu Kaaja (b. 1984) is an author and scriptwriter who studied creative writing in Helsinki and got her MA from the University of Salford. Her debut Metamorphoslip (2015), a surrealist collection of short stories, came second in the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize competition. In 2017 it was awarded the Jarkko Laine Literature Prize. Leda (2017) was her first novel. It was nominated for the Runeberg Prize and awarded with Toisinkoinen Literature Prize. Kaaja’s novel Katie-Kate (2020) was greeted a brilliant and disturbing story about royals, cindarellas and our times.
Congratulations to the author, and fingers crossed!