Author: Chiara

Ellen Strömberg’s We’ll Just Ride Past, the winner of the August Prize 2022, is now travelling to the Faroe Islands, marking six language territories for the title.

We’ll Just Ride Past by Ellen Strömberg is continuing its journey into the world and it is now travelling to the Faroe Islands, where it will be published by Bókadeild Føroya lærarafelags, marking the sixth language territory for this YA title which is the winner of the August Prize 2022.

We’ll Just Ride Past won the August Prize, the most prestigious literary prize in Sweden, in 2022 and its rights has already been sold for Italian, Korean, Slovenian, Polish and Catalan. In We’ll Just Ride Past we follow Manda and Malin, two best friends in a small town where nothing ever happens. The girls are known as the Bicycles, because they’re always riding around looking for excitement, be it people to hang out with, a party, a little love – anything goes. One day Malin develops a crush on a guy working at the local pizzeria, and a series on events – both fun and not so fun – begins to unfold. We’ll Just Ride Past is an accurate portrayal of a moment in life where it’s perfectly normal to change style and music taste every week and the world awaits.

Bókadeild Føroya lærarafelags is the Faroese Teachers’ Association’s Publishing Company, and it specializes in children’s and YA literature. Bókadeild Føroya lærarafelags, founded in 1956, publishes about 80 books a year and strives to bring high-quality literature to the Faroe from all over the world: it is the Faroese home of, among others, the Harry Potter series and the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series.

Congratulations to the author and the publishers!

Linnea Kuuluvainen’s dystopian debut The Thick of the Forest is travelling to Croatia, where it will be published by Hangar 7.

The Thick of the Forest by Linnea Kuuluvainen, one of this year’s strongest debuts, has begun its journey into the world and is travelling to Croatia, where it will be published by Hangar 7.

The Thick of the Forest is set in a near future where nature has started fighting back against humanity, destroying the world as we know it. To escape nature’s vengeance and isolate themselves from it as well as they can, people have fled to small city-states surrounded by walls. One of them is the former city of Turku, where a tightly guarded Nation has been established. Ingrid grew up in this new world, and has lived all her life in the Nation. After her mother’s death, she gets a job with a research group called Wild Rosemary, whose task is to map the conditions outside the walls of the Nation. Although the forest has been pacified, it is still angry and dangerous, and soon there is discord among the researchers as well. 

Mixing elements from Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in the unique setting of a Finnish forest capable of utter destruction, The Thick of the Forest is an entrancing and linguistically captivating first novel about a forest that haunts people and two women, Edla and Ingrid, whose stories intersect. The result is a rich telling of the relationship between mankind and nature, and of how the lines dividing them become increasingly blurry in the depth of the forest. In Finland, the book is published by Gummerus, and has been welcomed with glowing reviews by Finnish critics and media.

Hangar 7 is a Croatian publisher with a focus on high-quality spe-fi and fantasy literature. They are the Croatian home of, among others, Christelle Dabos, Terry Pratchett, and Brandon Sanderson.

Congratulations to the author and the publisher!

Iida Turpeinen’s Beasts of the Sea, the hot book of 2023, continues its sensational domestic and international success: 50.000 copies of the book have now been sold in Finland alone in just a year on the market.

Beasts of the Sea is a literary achievement and a breathtaking adventure through three centuries. Approaching natural diversity through individual destinies, it’s a story of grand human ambitions and the urge to resurrect what humankind in its ignorance has destroyed. Steller’s sea cow, a sirenian lost to extinction centuries ago, is revived on the pages and is the red thread that ties together the individual fates of a group of people throughout the centuries.

The novel is the winner of The Thank You for the Book Award, Finland’s booksellers’ prize, the best debut award, the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize, and a nominee for Finland’s biggest literary award, the Finlandia Prize, as well as for the Torch-bearer Prize. Its international breakthrough has been acknowledged for example by the Bookseller and its foreign rights have been sold to 26 territories all over the world. The German edition, out with Fischer, is a current hit in Germany, and its French edition by Autrement has been welcomed with rave reviews on French media, including on the newspaper Liberation.

In Finland, Beasts of the Sea is published by Kustantamo S&S, part of Schildts & Söderströms.

Iida Turpeinen (b. 1987) is a Helsinki-based literary scholar currently writing a dissertation on the intersection of the natural sciences and literature. As an author, she is intrigued by the literary potentials of scientific research and by the offbeat anecdotes and meanderings from the history of science. 

Warmest congratulations to the author!

101 Ways To Kill Your Husband by Laura Lindstedt & Sinikka Vuola has landed a glowing review on the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, that published the review as part of a series on the nominees for the Nordic Council Literature Prize.

Inspired by a real-life case from the 80s in which Anja, a Finnish woman, shot to death her abusive husband, 101 Ways To Kill Your Husband flips over a common trope of crime and mystery literature, in which the story opens with the discovery of the body of a beautiful young woman, by telling a story where it is instead an abusive man who gets murdered, 101 times. What’s more, the trial that followed the murder resulted in a historical sentence when the jury found the husband posthumously guilty of both the abuse he inflicted on his wife and of his own murder.

The Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet joins other Finnish and international media in reviewing 101 Ways To Kill Your Husband with favour, stating that “in a joint novel two Finnish authors explore how form and style can affect the content in a text. The result is like a derailed version of Märta Tikkanen’s “Manrape”. […] On top of the Oulipo movement’s high literary influences, another central source of inspiration is Simon Bond’s illustrated book “A Hundred and One Uses for a Dead Cat “(1981), whose macabre humor the authors have successfully absorbed. On the side of the literary inspirations another proclaimed angle is the feminist social question presented in the introduction. The authors’ tiredness of the very wide-spread trope in popular culture of a murdered woman namely works as a further prompt to the project. The subject is serious, but the approach is playful.“

101 Ways To Kill Your Husband embraces the experimental approach with a boldness that is both refreshing and, based on how the book has been received, very successful. The review underlines this and then touches on how one can think of the difficulties that may arise in translating an experimental work:

“The experimental approach is not a novelty for either of the authors. On the contrary it is the basis for their activities, which have their roots in a view on literature as both a free form of art and a serious social factor. In the different style variations this can be seen in the vigor with which they use the qualities of the Finnish language and the literary references they borrow. […] translation can be seen as a sort of continuation of the whole project, another setting of variations that on top of the form’s relationship to the content even actualize questions that deal with language and culture specificity. “

101 Ways To Kill Your Husband is one of the nominees for the Nordic Council Literature Prize, and has already travelled to France, where the rights are with Gallimard, Denmark, and Hungary.

A full Swedish translation, penned by this year’s winner of the Runeberg award, poet Peter Mickwitz, is available.

Congratulations to the authors, and don’t miss out on this title!

To My Brother by E.L. Karhu hits the stage: the theatre play makes its debut at the Finnish National Theatre on September 19th, and will stay there all the way into mid-October.

The play is directed by Otto Sandqvist, and in the main roles are Niina Hosiasluoma, Sara Melleri, Herman Nyby and Emma Pälsynaho.

To My Brother is E.L. Karhu‘s debut novel, but theatre-goers will recognise her as an established playwright so it is with joy that To My Brother is welcomed on the stage.

The novel follows a greedy, lonely girl who watches her beautiful, popular brother atop the sensual bodies of his girlfriend candidates. If someone were to look at the girl, they might see a loser who binges on sweets, devours soap operas, and trails her brother like a shadow. Her intense narration forces one to stare, to look more closely. Is this only strange, or is there, actually, something that you can relate to? To My Brother is filled with dark humour, the oddities of an out-grown sibling relationship, of many-facets lust, and social and sexual hierarchies. It is striking, deep, entertaining, funny, and tragic at the same time, and it certainly is a novel unlike anything else you have read.

In October 2021, it was nominated for the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize, given to the best debut of the year. In 2023 it was nominated for the Medicis prize for the best work of foreign fiction, and its French rights have been acquired by La Peuplade.

In Finland, To My Brother is published by Teos.