November is ending with one more exciting success: author Marisha Rasi-Koskinen was awarded Torch-Bearer Prize for her new novel REC!
Torch-Bearer Prize, otherwise called the Finnish Literary Export Award, is given every year to a title that is believed to have the most potential to succeed abroad. The award sum is 5000 euros.
As the jury and its chairman Kjell Westö stated about the book:
“The novel masterfully plays with various levels of time and place, the storytelling, as well as concepts of images and filming. The book is extraordinary in its abundance of internal stories that form the whole. The centre of it is a friendship that starts at a young age and involves many mysteries, addictions and traumas.“
REC is an atmospheric, post-modern dive into the fragmented reality we are living today. When teenager Lucas meets a peculiar boy named Cole, it is a start of a decades-long on-and-off friendship, where real and fictional characters are present simultaneously, where images and stories begin many times, in various places, and where dark, possessive and manipulating side of humans take over with irrevocable outcomes – unless… nothing is true. As the author herself describes the book, “it is a love letter to fiction”, where the reality is not unambiguous and the understanding of it is rather formed in people’s minds, stories and images.
Marisha Rasi-Koskinen has published six works of fiction. In 2019, her first YA book The Dark Side of the Sun won the most prestigious literary prize of the year, Finlandia Junior.
Last year, Torch-Bearer Prize was awarded to another HLA author, Minna Rytisalo, for her novel Mrs C.
Congratulations to the author!