Month: September 2024

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!