The Book of Misty Trees, the newest book by award-winning and internationally best-selling author Anja Portin, has been nominated for the LukuVarkaus Prize.
The Book of Misty Trees, our newest middle grade book by the internationally successful author of Radio Popov Anja Portin, has been nominated for the LukuVarkaus Prize.
The Book of Misty Trees (Sumupuiden kirja, 2023)
The LukuVarkaus Prize by the Finnish Children’s Book Institute is a nation-wide prize awarded annually to the best children’s book for children under 12 from the previous year. A jury of 4-6 adults selects between 6 and 10 shortlisted books to be judged by the Children’s Jury. The actual winner is selected by a six-member jury of children aged 7-12. The Children’s LukuVarkaus Prize is awarded annually to a Finnish children’s book written in Finnish.
In The Book of Misty Trees, we follow Magda Murkbird as she loses her mother in a horrible accident and needs to learn to cope on her own. Luckily, she is not all alone but has Chestnut – the best dog on earth. In fact, it is thanks to Chestnut that Magda has survived unscathed. The two set off on a journey to look for Magda’s aunt she has never met, and on the way they get lost in a mysterious thick fog covering the peak of the Misty Mountain. It is the beginning of an adventure into a different world, one where mankind and nature depend on one another to survive, but where danger is lurking in the shadows.
The Book of Misty Trees has already travelled to Estonia and Denmark.
101 Ways To Kill Your Husband by Laura Lindstedt & Sinikka Vuola is one of the nominees for this year’s Nordic Council Literature Prize. This Oulipo title has been received with raving reviews in Finland, and sold to Gallimard for World French.
101 Ways to Kill Your Husband by Laura Lindstedt & Sinikka Vuola has been nominated for this year’s Nordic Council Literature Prize. This is absolutely stunning news for this edgy, beautiful Oulipo title, sold to Gallimard for World French and for which a full Swedish translation by Runeberg Prize winner Peter Mickwitz is available.
Sinikka Vuola & Laura Lindstedt
The Nordic Council Literature Prize is a prestigious yearly award founded in 1962 and aiming at fostering interest in the literature and the language of Nordic countries. The jury have motivated the nomination as follows:
“In 1983, the sensationalist Finnish crime magazine Alibi published a news article about Finnish Anja B., who had shot her Norwegian husband, Thorvald. The court in Oslo handed down the historic verdict that the deceased was guilty, since he had abused his wife brutally for years. The decisive witness in the trial was the family’s teenage daughter.
In their joint work 101 tapaa tappaa aviomies (in English: “101 ways to kill a spouse. A procedural murder mystery”), Laura Lindstedt and Sinikka Vuola create variations of the basic story through 101 styles, thereby illuminating it from different angles and creating different frames for what happened. The result is a delightfully intelligent, surprising, touching, funny, diverse, and Oulipo-inspired cavalcade of methods. The variations used include anagrams, limericks, ballads, sonnets, lullabies, and hyperbole.
101 Ways To Kill Your Husband (101 tapaa tappaa aviomies, 2022)
The work as a whole shows the violence that Anja is subjected to in its everydayness and immodesty, upsetting the traditional structure of crime novels where the story begins with the death of a young woman. In this work, the violent man dies no fewer than 101 times.
Laura Lindstedt (phil. mag., born in 1976) is putting the finishing touches to her doctoral thesis on the French author Nathalie Sarraute’s tropisms and the problem of communication. Lindstedt’s second novel, Oneiron – fantasia kuolemanjälkeisistä sekunneista (2015), won the Finlandia Prize and was nominated for the Runeberg Prize and the Nordic Council Literature Prize. The translation rights for her most recent novel, Ystäväni Natalia (2019) (My friend Natalia, Liveright 2021, translated by David Hackston), have been sold to several countries around the world.
Sinikka Vuola’s (phil. mag., born in 1972) debut poetry collection, Orkesteri jota emme kuule(2007), won the Kalevi Jäntti prize and her debut novel, Replika (2016), was nominated for the Runeberg Prize. Vuola is a member of the Mahdollisen Kirjallisuuden Seura Association, which explores prose methods. She, like Laura Lindstedt, is one of the authors of the procedural collective novel Ihmiskokeita (2016). In addition, she is the editor of the erotic poetry anthology Olet täyttänyt ruumiini tulella (2017). “
Wept Another is travelling to Sweden: Historiska Media, the Swedish publisher of Before the Birds, Mäki’s first novel, will be the Swedish home of this title as well.
Merja Mäki’s newest book has started its journey into the world: Wept Another is now travelling to Sweden, where it will be published by Historiska Media, the publisher of Mäki’s first novel, the Torch Bearer award-winning Before the Birds.
Wept Another (Itki toisenkin, 2024)
Wept Another follows Larja, a young woman from Eastern Karelia. It is 1942, and peace has momentarily descended on this bit of territory recently reclaimed from the Soviets by Finnish troops. Larja has been studying at a teacher training camp and upon her return to her home village she has to come to terms with the fact that nothing is as it was. Her grandmother Matja, the village’s most-respected professional lamenter, is deathly ill, and her little sister Pola carries a secret deep within her heart. Their mother and father, carted off to a gulag years ago, are still missing. As Larja cares for her ailing grandmother, she listens to the messages the trees are sending her on the northern winds and discovers that she too has the gift of wailing. However, it requires great courage to accompany the dead to the other side, and she has been focusing on a career as a teacher. After a Finnish man steps into her life, Larja finds herself again torn between two different worlds. Wept Another is the story of a young woman who has grown up between two cultures on the border of two countries. It is a tale of roots and the ties that bind us, but above all, of the choices that you must make in life.
Historiska Media is a Swedish publishing house based in Lund and specialised in books that deal with history from a variety of different angles. They have published the Swedish edition of Mäki’s Before the Birds, which was an immediate success.
The Natural Comedy by Ulla Donner and Endless Winter by Miila Westin have been nominated for the Finlandia Comics Award. This is the second award nomination for both titles, also running for the Most Beautiful Book of the Year Award.
“The Natural Comedy takes a birch leaf and a mixed mushroom on an adventure through a forest and what is left of it, through hell and purgatory. But is it possible to find a way to heaven in the middle of an environmental catastrophe? Even though there is only a limited palette of colours, the images are rich in content and bring new insights upon a closer look”
“[in Endless Winter] Elves, forest folk, goblins, goblins and other mythical characters of the Baltic Finns abound in this comic novel by Miila Westin. With colourful and clear illustrations, this album is suitable for adventurers of all ages.”
The winner of the Finlandia Comics award will be announced on March 22nd.
Endless Winter (Loputon Talvi, 2023)
The Natural Comedy is the third graphic novel by Ulla Donner and it rethinks Dante’s Divine Comedy by making a birch leaf and a mushroom the protagonists and sending them on a roadtrip through the forest, resulting in a devastatingly funny and beautiful work that sharply criticises mankind’s exploitation of nature and contemporary society.
Endless Winter by Miila Westin is the first of a series of graphic novels for children with Baltic and Finnish mythological elements, and it follows 11-year-old Eevi as she realizes that something has gone awry and winter will last forever unless she finds a way to awaken spring.
The Finlandia Prize-winning novel Destruction by Iida Rauma has been acquired by one of Hungary’s most prestigeous literary publishing houses, Magvető.
Destruction by Iida Rauma quickly caught critics’ and readers’ attention when it came out in 2022 thanks to its combination of a strong and captivating literary voice, an impressive thematic depth and the ability to bring to the fore a social issue often overlooked: how children are treated in society. In Destruction, Rauma turns the spotlight onto violence in schools, but builds the theme into even bigger issues: how the strong tend always to exercise their power on the weaker ones. According to Turun Sanomat newspaper, the novel is “a dazzling demonstration of art’s potential to expose societal structures”.
Destruction (Hävitys, 2022)
Magvető is one of Hungary’s most prestigious publishing houses. It is the home of Imre Kertész, the only Hungarian laureate of theNobel Prize in Literature, and of László Krasznahorkai, the only Hungarian winner of the International Man Booker Prize. It is also the publisher of authors such as César Aira, Michel Houellebecq, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Gabriel García Márquez and Lyudmila Ulitskaya.
