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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.

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.