Body of Evidence by Susanna Hast, the winner of the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize for the best debut in 2022, is travelling to Germany, where it will be published by Nautilus.
Body of Evidence, Susanna Hast’s award-winning debut, is now travelling to Germany, where it will be published by Nautilus.
Susanna Hast’s intimately personal debut novel Body of Evidence shows how bodies remember things language cannot reach. It is a ferocious, fearless and dazzlingly intelligent account about the history of silencing women. Her survival takes place in the chiasm of remembering and forgetting, and the novel shakes its readers to the core.
It all starts in the 1990s, in a small village up north. There is a terraced house, a block of flats, a bedroom, a bathroom, a living room. A crime has been committed, but no one has called the police, no evidence is gathered, suspects are not questioned. Years later, a woman starts following traces on the fringes of her memory, so as to find the missing archival truth of what happened to her. She needs to write out the truth in order to regain her humanity.
In 2022, the novel was awarded the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize, with the head of the jury Antti Majander stating that “with her work, Hast brought autotheoretical literature to Finland”. Hast’s prose has been compared to Maggie Nelson’s genre-defying prose and to In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado.
Author Susanna Hast (b. 1981) has a doctorate in Social Sciences. She works as a researcher and Associate Professor at Uniarts Helsinki. She has researched war, compassion and corporality.
Nautilus is an independent publishing house founded in 1974 and located in Hamburg. Edition Nautilus publishes fiction and political non-fiction as well as biographies and a small art-series named »Die Kleine Bücherei«. Among their author are Maurizio Maggiani, Leonora Carrington, Sven Recker and Anne Emmert.
Warm congratulations to the author and the publisher!