Author: Chiara Stanziani

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!

Anu Kaaja‘s short story The Wallpaper (Tapetti) has been featured on Trafika Europe, a literature magazine that aims at introducing new voices and introducing audiences to contemporary European literatures.

The Wallpaper (Tapetti), translated for Trafika Europe by Darcy Hurford, is part of Anu Kaaja’s Metamorphoslip, a collection of short stories about metamorphoses. In The Wallpaper an artist is summoned to a country estate to make a copy of an antique wallpaper. The wallpaper is a lush, colourful portrait of a forest and a garden, but the lord of the estate hates it. In an escalation of the weird atmosphere at the estate the wallpaper is eventually brought to life.

The remaining short stories also deal with metamorphoses from different angles: a statue of Napoleon walks away from its pedestal, a divine messenger starts bothering a window washer, a night of partying begins in present-day Finland and ends up at the court of the Sun King, among other things.  The metamorphoses are sometimes dreams come true, sometimes places of refuge, or nightmares. There are scenes both phantasmagorical and realistic, that both conceal and reveal all that is important and difficult for people, whether it concerns money, food, home, gender, or sex. And Kaaja tells it in language that is precise and crammed to bursting, whether with joy or sadness.

You can read The Wallpaper here.

Author Kari Hotakainen, one of Finland’s most prolific and famous authors, has just returned to the literary scene with a new novel, Pearl.

In Pearl, a childless couple goes on a mushroom-picking trip in the woods and runs into an elderly woman who seems very confused and can’t even remember her name. As they meet, everybody’s life suddenly gets speedier, bumpier, and more absurd than anyone could ever imagine. 

Pearl is a charming, humorous, and moving story, where tragic things attain a tone of warm, gentle comedy. If one loses control of one’s memories and life, what is there left to hold on to? 

A fast-paced plot and on-the-spot dialogue will make anyone laugh out loud, whereas topical questions, reflected in a casual, yet poignant manner, will remind the reader that, in the end, only our humanity makes our lives worthwhile.

Pearl is being distributed in the Kesko group grocery shops, one of the leading distributors in Finland with over 1000 selling points. The first print run counts 35.000 copies and the project has the declared goal of boosting reading among the public by reaching readers as widely as possible.

Congratulations to the author!

Linnea Kuuluvainen‘s debut novel The Thick of the Forest has been turning heads and scoring favourable reviews since its release earlier this year. The latest glowing review comes from the Suomen Kuvalehti magazine, that states that “Linnea Kuuluvainen’s debut novel immediately rises to the top of the charts of Finnish speculative fiction.”

The review goes on to praise the structure of the book and how it places itself in the tradition of the top dystopian and spe-fi literature: “There’s two different years in which things are happening in The Thick of the Forest, 2060 and 2084, a hardly coincidental wink at George Orwell [‘s 1984]. […] A good reference other than Orwell’s Oceania state is Margaret Atwood’s Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale. In the novel an extreme regulation of reproductive rights carried out in the shadow of an ecocatastrophe has led to a complete collapse of women’s rights”.

The Thick of the Forest follows in fact the fates of two young women, Edla and Ingrid, on two different timelines in a scenario where nature has started fighting back against human exploitation and the forest has turned into a deadly force to be reckoned with. Mixing questions about environmentalism, love, right and wrong and mankind’s relationship with nature, Kuuluvainen‘s debut ” is still the best debut since Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water. Much can be expected from this author.”

Congratulations to the author!