Fantastic news for our authors: Ann-Christin Antell’s Cotton Mill Trilogy, Susanna Hast’s Body of Evidence and Marja Kyllönen’s The Undeparted are at the top of FILI’s Book Picks 2023 for adult fiction! Many other HLA authors, including Merja Mäki’s and her novel Before the Birds, also made the list.
For children’s titles, our beloved A Giraffe’s Heart is Unbelievably Large by Amanda & Sofia Chanfreau tops the list, tightly followed by the endearing and successful YA novel We’ll Just Ride Past, by Ellen Strömberg.
This comes at a great time for all these titles: the Cotton Mill Trilogy, a historical romance about three generations of women and their family business, has recently made its 5th foreign sale, and Hast’s Body of Evidence, a startling work of autotheory, has received wide accolade and won the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize.
Marja Kyllönen’s The Undeparted, a dark twist on the story of a childless couple, has been awarded the Runeberg Prize, and Merja Mäki’s Before the Birds, a gorgeous story of struggle and hope set in the time of World War II, has been sold to France and Sweden and has been awarded the Torch-Bearer Prize.
A Giraffe’s Heart is Unbelievably Large by Sofia & Amanda Chanfreau has been wildly successful: a Finlandia Junior winner in 2022, its foreign rights have been sold to 14 territories and has received raving reviews. In theYA category, We’ll Just Ride Past, by Ellen Strömberg has been nominated for the 2023 Nordic Council Children and Young People’s Literature Prize and has recently been sold to both Italy and Korea.
Warm congratulations to the authors, and don’t miss out on these titles!