Finlandia Junior Prize winning RADIO POPOV by Anja Portin is getting a huge amount of attention, with an ongoing auction in Russia and an offer from Italy on the table.
Only a week has passed from the Finlandia Junior Prize celebration where Anja Portin’s middle-grade novel RADIO POPOV was awarded as the best children’s book of 2020, and the book has already found its way to the hearts of many European children’s book publishers. The rights of the warm-hearted adventure story, compared to such classics as Roald Dahl and Astrid Lindgren, has been so far sold to
Bulgaria, Perseus Denmark, Staarup & co. Estonia, Ühinenud ajakirjad Latvia, Janis Roze Lithuania, Alma littera Netherlands, Ploegsma.
And there is more to come, as there is an ongoing auction in Russia and a fresh offer from Italy on the table – and loads of interest from other areas!
You can read more about the book here, and more about the author here.
Anu Kaaja’s latest novel Katie-Kate(2020) has been awarded Kalevi Jäntti Prize 2020.
Katie-Kate (2020)
The jury stated: “Anu Kaaja’s Katie-Kate confuses even the most hard-core readers. What is the meaning of this provocative porn novel? What right has the author have to rub all this vocabulary, these images and this kind of material on our faces? Why should we get interested in a collage which combines princess fairy tales, celebrity culture and internet porn?
Anu Kaaja’s disturbing novel requires concentrating and overcoming the urge to reject it, but little by little it shows its integrity. An angry, feminist analysis of class and gender arise from the obscene carnivalism. Katie-Katie is, no doubt, an intellectual manifestation against the patriarchy, but what makes it an interesting novel is the sovereign and unscrupulous way it makes different genres collide with one another. The result is a sharp mixture, in which the most important ingredient is humour, sometimes incorrect and self-conscious. Katie-Kate is an outstanding, bold and original novel.”
In Katie-Kate, the stories of Kate Middleton, Katie Price and Princess Diana intertwine with main stream porn. A sharp societal analysis reveals a world in which Disney owns nostalgy, Pornhub owns lust and independent women choose to be enslaved princesses.
Anu Kaaja (Photo: Saara Salmi)
Kaaja says she’s grown up in an age when the roles women play in media have changed a lot in a short time. “The strong female characters that have become visible in entertainment have not shifted the focus from the looks and appearances. In Katie-Kate I deal with learned misogyny, the work it takes to maintain good looks, ‘Disney brainwashing’ and my mixed relationship with marriage as an institution.”
Anu Kaaja (b. 1984) is an author and scriptwriter. Her debut novel Metamorphoslip(2015) was awarded with Jarkko Laine Prize and nominated for Helsingin Sanomat Literary Award. Her second novel Leda(2017) won Toisinkoinen literature prize and was nominaterd for Runeberg Award.
Niina Mero’s debut romance novel The Death of Romance has been sold to Sekwa in Sweden.
The Death of Romance (2020)
The Death of Romance, praised among other things as “romantic entertainment to those who dread romantic entertainment”, was published in 2019 and soon turned out to be the readers’ favourite. With close to 15,000 sold copies and praising reviews, a new star had risen to the Finnish sky of commercial women’s fiction.
In the novel, Nora, the tattooed and very Finnish version of Bridget Jones, travels to Oxford to be soon swiped off her feet by the gothic atmosphere of Jane Eyre, the upper-class romance of Downton Abbey and the plotting and scheming known from British crime series. With no illusions about love but with masses of insight into English poetry, Nora soon stumbles on family secrets – and to her surprise also on English gentlemen who seem very able to distract her inquisitive mind.
Niina Mero (Photo: Marek Sabogal)
Sekwa is a Swedish publishing house specializing in translated contemporary literature. Founded in 2005, it has a strong list of well-written, entertaining and captivating literature.
Read more about the novel here and about the author here.
The Finlandia Junior Prize nominated Radio Popov by Anja Portin has been acquired to Denmark by Straarup & Co.
The novel has previously been sold to Estonia and Latvia.
The novel begins when a nine-year-old Alfred the Forgotten, virtually abandoned by his father, meets Amanda, a paperwoman and one of the Sharp Ears. After finding an old radio transmitter designed by a Russian physicist, A. S. Popov, Alfred starts making a secret, nightly radio broadcast for all the other forgotten children in the city.
The unforgettable adventure has been compared to Roald Dahl’s classics, where often experience mistreated children escape the poor conditions by the means of adventure and persistence.
Staarup & co. is a Danish publishing house, founded in 2017, which publishes books for children and young adults.
Kari Hotakainen’s new novel Story was August’s #1 bestseller in Finland, with so far 20,000 sold copies.
Kari Hotakainen’s Story, published on 12th August 2020, rose expectedly to place #1 on the Finnish bestseller list. Hotakainen has a long record of hitting the top ten with his novels – not to mention his first and so far only work of nonfiction, the biography The Unknown Kimi Räikkönen, which has sold over 200,000 copies in Finland and over 100,000 abroad.
Kari Hotakainen (Photo by Laura Malmivaara)
Story tells about a country, not very unlike Finland, in which the countryside has been turned into a Recreation Area and everyone lives in the City. Occupations and job descriptions have changed or disappeared altogether, no one can find their place, things have got out of control, the Decision Makers are in trouble. What matters now is who can tell the best story – and whose lives are worth telling about.
Spot on in its critique towards many phenomena of our times, Story is a wildly funny, speedy and slyly deep novel. It is unlike anything Hotakainen has written before.
Read more about the novel here and about the author here.
“One of the main observations of the novel is that everyone is pretending to be something – some of us only are better at telling stories. Story feels more catchy than Hotakainen in a while, though he fits worse than before the story of an author with a short sentence. He reforms his writing interestingly, but still stays the same. […] He makes you laugh out loud, and miraculously, the ability to bend the world with only words abides. Especially the beginning of the Story […] is powerful. […] The truth might be that if the only thing left from us is a story, only very few of us will have even a remotely interesting one.” – Hämeen Sanomat newspaper
“Story hits like a sledgehammer, tickles like a tick in the trouser leg. It makes you angry, it makes you laugh, it makes you jot down a number of short quotations about youtubers, about the prophets of the sweat, body and food, about everything becoming a story, about those who lie a personality and life to themselves.” – Apu magazine
“Kari Hotakainen’s Story is outrageously funny, but reading it you also feel angry and sad. Blaming the unemployed, the urban superficiality and the consultant twaddle – we are already living in this world.” – Maaseudun tulevaisuus newspaper
“Kari Hotakainen’s Story is a plea for the people who are ‘only’ something – only nurses, masseurs, assistants, secreteries, bus drivers, cashiers, plumbers, carpenters and cleaning women (as listed in Story). If all these ‘only’ something people would suddenly disappear, the world would stop.” – Annelin kirjoissa book blog
“Story” is humorous and in hits often the bull’s eye in its critique towards stories.” – Helsingin Sanomat newspaper
