Author: Chiara

The Natural Comedy by Ulla Donner is this year’s winner of the Urhunden Prize, Sweden’s largest and most prestigious comics award.

Ulla Donner‘s The Natural Comedy has won the Urhunden Prize 2024, Sweden’s largest and most prestigious comics award, given by the Swedish Comics Association Seriefrämjandet at the Ystad Comics Festival. The jury have motivated their choice as follows:

“The Natural Comedy by Ulla Donner is an allegorical tale of how we as people act on social media and in society, but here the narration is up to the mushrooms and the trees. Unfortunately, it’s humans who are the villain in the drama, who rob the forest of its life. Nature continues its work year after year the best it can.

The visual language has clear contrasts in the limited colour palette, where there’s only room for black, blue, and yellow in what feels like a linoleum print. […]Text and dialogue connect with classic works in harmony with contemporary expressions. The Natural Comedy contains many different components of new and old that both make us feel at home and allow us to experience something new. Every little piece does its job, exactly like in nature.”

The Natural Comedy is Ulla Donner‘s third graphic novel, and it has been received with wide critical acclaim. Born as a twist on Dante’s The Divine Comedy, the work follows Birch, a leaf who makes a crash landing on Candy after falling off a tree on the way to the Great Autumn Party. The reluctant duo embark on a roadtrip through the forest, which has been destroyed by mankind, and encounter a string of weird characters along the way. Donner’s pencil stuns readers with vivid illustrations rich in blues, whites and yellows that bring the forest to life and give the main characters rounded, human-like and extremely cute features.

The Natural Comedy has also been nominated for the Finlandia Comics Award and the Most Beautiful Book of the Year Award.

The Urhunden Prize was established in 1987 and has since been awarded to one domestic and one translated title each year. The prize owes its name to a comics series by Oskar Andersson in the early 1900s that features a dog-like dinosaur named Urhunden (“prehistoric, ancient dog”). In 2021 the prize was put on hold as the organisers planned on renewing and enlarging its structure and this year it has finally come back with a blast. The list of winners includes Ulli Lust, who won this year’s prize for the best translated comics, Alan Moore, Marjane Satrapi, Charlie Christensen and Joakim Pirinen, among others.

Warmest congratulations to the author!

Anu Kaaja‘s short story The Wallpaper (Tapetti) has been featured on Trafika Europe, a literature magazine that aims at introducing new voices and introducing audiences to contemporary European literatures.

The Wallpaper (Tapetti), translated for Trafika Europe by Darcy Hurford, is part of Anu Kaaja’s Metamorphoslip, a collection of short stories about metamorphoses. In The Wallpaper an artist is summoned to a country estate to make a copy of an antique wallpaper. The wallpaper is a lush, colourful portrait of a forest and a garden, but the lord of the estate hates it. In an escalation of the weird atmosphere at the estate the wallpaper is eventually brought to life.

The remaining short stories also deal with metamorphoses from different angles: a statue of Napoleon walks away from its pedestal, a divine messenger starts bothering a window washer, a night of partying begins in present-day Finland and ends up at the court of the Sun King, among other things.  The metamorphoses are sometimes dreams come true, sometimes places of refuge, or nightmares. There are scenes both phantasmagorical and realistic, that both conceal and reveal all that is important and difficult for people, whether it concerns money, food, home, gender, or sex. And Kaaja tells it in language that is precise and crammed to bursting, whether with joy or sadness.

You can read The Wallpaper here.

Author Kari Hotakainen, one of Finland’s most prolific and famous authors, has just returned to the literary scene with a new novel, Pearl.

In Pearl, a childless couple goes on a mushroom-picking trip in the woods and runs into an elderly woman who seems very confused and can’t even remember her name. As they meet, everybody’s life suddenly gets speedier, bumpier, and more absurd than anyone could ever imagine. 

Pearl is a charming, humorous, and moving story, where tragic things attain a tone of warm, gentle comedy. If one loses control of one’s memories and life, what is there left to hold on to? 

A fast-paced plot and on-the-spot dialogue will make anyone laugh out loud, whereas topical questions, reflected in a casual, yet poignant manner, will remind the reader that, in the end, only our humanity makes our lives worthwhile.

Pearl is being distributed in the Kesko group grocery shops, one of the leading distributors in Finland with over 1000 selling points. The first print run counts 35.000 copies and the project has the declared goal of boosting reading among the public by reaching readers as widely as possible.

Congratulations to the author!

Linnea Kuuluvainen‘s debut novel The Thick of the Forest has been turning heads and scoring favourable reviews since its release earlier this year. The latest glowing review comes from the Suomen Kuvalehti magazine, that states that “Linnea Kuuluvainen’s debut novel immediately rises to the top of the charts of Finnish speculative fiction.”

The review goes on to praise the structure of the book and how it places itself in the tradition of the top dystopian and spe-fi literature: “There’s two different years in which things are happening in The Thick of the Forest, 2060 and 2084, a hardly coincidental wink at George Orwell [‘s 1984]. […] A good reference other than Orwell’s Oceania state is Margaret Atwood’s Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale. In the novel an extreme regulation of reproductive rights carried out in the shadow of an ecocatastrophe has led to a complete collapse of women’s rights”.

The Thick of the Forest follows in fact the fates of two young women, Edla and Ingrid, on two different timelines in a scenario where nature has started fighting back against human exploitation and the forest has turned into a deadly force to be reckoned with. Mixing questions about environmentalism, love, right and wrong and mankind’s relationship with nature, Kuuluvainen‘s debut ” is still the best debut since Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water. Much can be expected from this author.”

Congratulations to the author!

Elk Girl by Malin Klingenberg is travelling to Italy, where it will be published by Emons, marking the 3rd foreign deal for this title.

Elk Girl by Malin Klingenberg continues to succeed: this delicate YA title is now travelling to Italy, where it will be published by Emons. This is the third language territory for Elk Girl, whose German and World Spanish rights have already been sold.

In Elk Girl we follow Johanna, who has just started middle school and notices that a lot has changed during the summer: her best friend Sandra has started to spend time with the most popular girls in their year and is doing anything to get their approval. Johanna only wants things to be as they were. Luckily, Johanna’s got her forest den, where she can enjoy the fresh forest air and study the animals in peace. One day, she spots an elk in the forest and decides to befriend and tame it. To make everything more difficult, the hunting season is around the corner, and even Johanna’s dad is a member of the hunting club. And who is the mysterious new guy who loves hanging out in the woods?

Elk Girl is a touching young adult novel by Malin Klingenberg, following her popular middle grade novel series about the adventures of The Senior Squad. Critics and readers alike have heaped praise on the book.

Emons is an Italian publishing house with a broad selection of fiction of all genres. Their children’s and young readers’ selection, Emons Raga, spans from middle grade to YA with a special focus on nature, adventure and inclusivity and has been collecting awards and praise from critics, with two of their books making it to both the Andersen and the Strega prize shortlists in 2024.

Congratulations to the author and the publisher!