Hopelessness by Susanna Hast has been nominated for the prestigious Runeberg Prize
Wonderful news: Hopelessness by Susanna Hast has been nominated for the prestigious Runeberg Prize, the second largest literary prize in the country.
The prize, established in 1986, is awarded on a yearly basis to a literary work of fiction and a children’s book on Runeberg Day, February 5th, by the newspaper Uusimaa and the city of Porvoo and amounts to 20.000 euros per category.
The nominees are chosen by a jury that includes three literary professionals. This year it was author Essi Kummu, editor and critic Maaria Ylikangas, and critic and literary scholar Daniel Wickström Grönroos.
They have motivated their nomination of Hopelessness as follows: “The narrator of Susanna Hast’s Hopelessness lies down in a cold, empty bathtub and starts to pinpoint a vague, paralyzing emotional pain. Helplessness is at the same time a most unpleasant and a most rewarding reading experience. It is trauma literature marked by the compulsion to repeat – brave in its theoreticality and artistically resolute. The world of Hopelessness opens into a world of horror. The narrator approaches her avoidant mother like a bomb squad. When it comes to trauma, the unsaid looks for a new hiding place. “Anything fits in that container, and nothing does”. Helplessness refuses to give solutions, climaxes or to free the reader into the world outside the text unscathed. What political action this act is charged with.”
Hopelessness explores maternal rejection, diving deep into the subconscious and showing the institution of family and the concepts that hold it together – inheritance, gift, father, mother – in a merciless light. The work approaches the internal violence of intimate relationships, the necessity of separation and the horror of duality. It is a novel that stings from beginning to end.
Susanna Hast works as a researcher and Associate Professor at Uniarts university in Helsinki. She has researched war, compassion and corporality. Her debut novel Body of Evidence was awarded the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize for the best debut of the year in 2022. Hopelessness is her second novel.
Both her novels are published in Finland by Kustantamo S&S.
Warmest congratulations to the author and the publisher!