Rival to the Cotton Mill by Ann-Christin Antell, The Ribbon Bow by Anu Kaaja and Beasts of the Sea by Iida Turpeinen are among the nominees for this year’s Adlibris Award.
Three of the hot titles of last year’s Finnish fiction are now running for another accolade: Rival to the Cotton Mill by Ann-Christin Antell, The Ribbon Bow by Anu Kaaja, and Beasts of the Sea by Iida Turpeinen are among the nominees for Adlibris Award in the category of the best novel of the year. The winner for each category is voted by readers on Adlibris.
Adlibris is a large and popular online bookshop founded in Stockholm and active in Sweden, Finland and Norway. The Adlibris Award ails from the company’s native Sweden, where it was established in 2019, and it is being awarded in Finland for the first time this year.
Rival to the Cotton Mill is the third instalment in the Cotton Mill Trilogy by Ann-Christin Antell. The series sold over 140.000 copies in Finland alone, and is a perfect combination of romance, history, entertainment and the fight for workers’ rights. The series starts out in the late 1800s and lands in the Roaring Twenties.
The Ribbon Bow is the fourth novel by award-winning author Anu Kaaja and it is currently nominated for the Runeberg Prize, the second largest and most prestigious award in the country. The novel follows a heartbroken writer who sets out on a European trip in the style of the Grand Tour, visiting museums and enjoying art. The writer’s wanderings bring a fresh, at times irreverent perspective on some of the world’s most famous works of art and is a razor-sharp criticism of capitalism and the objectification of humans at the expense of the humanisation of objects. Everyday objects, like a bow, a coffee cup and a napkin, come to life and engage in conversation, while the human characters are difficult to reach and even harder to let go of.
Beasts of the Sea by Iida Turpeinen has been the literary sensation of 2023 from Finland, and has so far travelled to 21 language territories. This stunning debut and winner of the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize ties together an extinct sirenian, Steller’s sea cow, and the fates of the humans that tried to put together its skeleton across the centuries. The result is a spellbinding adventure and an enchanting portrayal of a lost creature.
Warmest congratulations to the nominees and the publishers, and fingers crossed!