What an autumn for our debut author Sanni Isometsä: nominated for the Best Debut Prize only last week, Isometsä is now among the 6 nominees running for the biggest literary award in the country, Finlandia Prize.
The prize jury has stated:
“This personal novel about the death of a spouse is a polished, controlled, and cohesive debut. The narrative approach poignantly articulates the experience of loss and the shifting reality that follows. The author depicts the ugly and difficult emotions associated with grief in a way that is both recognisable and honest.”
The Finlandia Prize is awarded yearly by the Finnish Book Foundation to “celebrate reading and highlight new Finnish first-rate literature.” Considered the most prestigious in the nation, the award is given in three categories: fiction, nonfiction and children’s and YA literature. The award sum is 30,000 euros, and the winner will be announced in a gala event on the 26th of November.
Anatomy of Absence is an account of a midwife suddenly losing her husband at a young age. After spending her working life at the beginning of things, Isometsä manages to write death the way she would write a birth: as something that happens to a body, in a room, in sequence. Grief here is physical before it is anything else, described with a clinician’s precision and none of a clinician’s distance.
For readers of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Naja Marie Aidt’s When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back, and Annie Ernaux’s autofiction, Sanni Isometsä is a sure bet. Aidt is the closest formal relative; Didion the market comparison; Ernaux the register. But Isometsä is warmer than all three, and considerably more approachable. With its merely 200 pages, Anatomy of Absence leaves an ever-lasting impression both emotionally and literarily.
Congratulations to the author and her publisher S&S!
