Author: Chiara Stanziani

Halla Helle, the first novel by Sami poet and activist Niillas Holmberg, will be available in French on February 16th in a gorgeous edition by Editions du Seuil.

Halla Helle, the first novel by Niillas Holmberg, is the first novel published in decades that is written by a Sámi author dealing with Sámi identity and culture. Critically acclaimed in Finland, where it was reviewed as “The Magic Mountain of Sámi culture”, its French rights were acquired by Editions du Seuil, who are releasing the French edition on February 16th with the title “La Femme grenouille“ in a translation by Sébastien Cagnoli.

In Halla Helle, a Finnish man named Samu leaves Southern Finland behind and moves to Sápmi. Something strange and powerful is taking him to Utsjoki: Elle Hallala, the best-known Sámi person in Finland, known by her artist alias Halla Helle. Having abandoned art, Elle withdraws from the world and moves on an arctic mountain to live her life according to her ancestors. She sends Samu her dreams written in poems. Freud and Jung come to Samu’s aid in interpreting Elle’s dreams in order to help her.

Niillas Holmberg (b. 1990) is a Sámi poet, musician, actor, and cultural and environmental activist living in his native Utsjoki in Lapland. He combines spoken word with singing and joik, traditional chanting, and performs his work with various bands. His poetry collection Lest the Weird Become Weirder (Amas amas amasmuvvat, 2014) was awarded the Saami Council’s Prize for Literature and was shortlisted for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. Also his latest collection Underfoot (Juolgevuod¯d¯u, 2019) was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize and has travelled to Estonia and Germany.

Le Seuil is a well-established publishing house, with a publishing history dating back to 1935. Nowadays, it is dedicated to represent as diverse literature as possible: French and translated fiction and nonfiction, thrillers, books on human sciences and philosophy, children’s and YA literature.

If you’re looking for more ways to celebrate the Sámi National Day today, don’t forget about the Literature from Finland podcast episode INDIGENOUS, where Niillas discussed his childhood in the Sámi community, his activism and creative work.

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!

Beasts of the Sea by Iida Turpeinen, Rival to the Cotton Mill by Ann-Christin Antell, Death Comes for the Dead by Sari Rainio & Juha Rautaheimo and Penelope and the Big Baby Tooth Ballyhoo by Saara Kekäläinen & Reetta Niemensivu are running for the Storytel Awards, in the categories literary fiction, romance, crime, and children’s literature respectively.

Storytel has published its list of nominees for the Storytel Awards, and we love to see several HLA titles making the list: Beasts of the Sea by Iida Turpeinen, Rival to the Cotton Mill by Ann-Christin Antell, Death Comes for the Dead by Sari Rainio & Juha Rautaheimo and Penelope and the Big Baby Tooth Ballyhoo by Saara Kekäläinen & Reetta Niemensivu have been nominated in the categories of literary fiction, romance, crime, and children’s literature.

Storytel Awards are given to books in the categories of literary fiction, crime and thriller, romance and feel-good, nonfiction and children’s literature on a yearly basis. The winners are chosen among the nominees by the users’ vote and by a professional jury, and will be announced on March 21st at the Storytel Awards Gala.

Beasts of the Sea by Iida Turpeinen has been the literary sensation of autumn 2023, mixing science and high-quality literature, and it has so far been sold to 22 territories.

Rival to the Cotton Mill by Ann-Christin Antell is the third installment in the Cotton Mill trilogy. It follows Paula, the head of marketing at her family business the cotton mill, who finds herself in a dilemma when the owner of the rivaling factory, starts to feel less like an enemy and more and more like someone to love. The book has been ranked in the top 10 most listened books on both Bookbeat and Storytel Finland, and the series has sold over 150,000 copies in Finland. The foreign rights have so far been sold for Danish, Dutch, French, Icelandic and Swedish.

Death Comes for the Dead is the second novel in the Mortui Non Silent series by Sari Rainio & Juha Rautaheimo. The shamelessly nostalgic crime series has been received with glowing reviews, and Death Comes for The Dead has been nominated for the Clew of the Year Award given to the best crime novel of the year in 2023.

Penelope and the Big Baby Tooth Ballyhoo is the second volume in the Finlandia-nominated Penelope series by Saara Kekäläinen & Reetta Niemensivu. Penelope is a pocked-sized girl with a very lively imagination, which turns washing her teeth into a hilarious adventure. What will happen when her baby teeth fall off? Maybe she’ll be sent a new sheep instead of new teeth? Or maybe she’ll receive a visit from the tooth fairy’s mischievous cousin, the tooth imp? The reader and Penelope will find out, and it is sure to be a fun ride!

Congratulations to all nominees, and fingers crossed!

Rival to the Cotton Mill by Ann-Christin Antell, The Ribbon Bow by Anu Kaaja and Beasts of the Sea by Iida Turpeinen are among the nominees for this year’s Adlibris Award.

Three of the hot titles of last year’s Finnish fiction are now running for another accolade: Rival to the Cotton Mill by Ann-Christin Antell, The Ribbon Bow by Anu Kaaja, and Beasts of the Sea by Iida Turpeinen are among the nominees for Adlibris Award in the category of the best novel of the year. The winner for each category is voted by readers on Adlibris.

Adlibris is a large and popular online bookshop founded in Stockholm and active in Sweden, Finland and Norway. The Adlibris Award ails from the company’s native Sweden, where it was established in 2019, and it is being awarded in Finland for the first time this year.

Rival to the Cotton Mill is the third instalment in the Cotton Mill Trilogy by Ann-Christin Antell. The series sold over 140.000 copies in Finland alone, and is a perfect combination of romance, history, entertainment and the fight for workers’ rights. The series starts out in the late 1800s and lands in the Roaring Twenties.

The Ribbon Bow is the fourth novel by award-winning author Anu Kaaja and it is currently nominated for the Runeberg Prize, the second largest and most prestigious award in the country. The novel follows a heartbroken writer who sets out on a European trip in the style of the Grand Tour, visiting museums and enjoying art. The writer’s wanderings bring a fresh, at times irreverent perspective on some of the world’s most famous works of art and is a razor-sharp criticism of capitalism and the objectification of humans at the expense of the humanisation of objects. Everyday objects, like a bow, a coffee cup and a napkin, come to life and engage in conversation, while the human characters are difficult to reach and even harder to let go of.

Beasts of the Sea by Iida Turpeinen has been the literary sensation of 2023 from Finland, and has so far travelled to 21 language territories. This stunning debut and winner of the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize ties together an extinct sirenian, Steller’s sea cow, and the fates of the humans that tried to put together its skeleton across the centuries. The result is a spellbinding adventure and an enchanting portrayal of a lost creature.

Warmest congratulations to the nominees and the publishers, and fingers crossed!

Helsinki Literary Agency joins Lit-Quest Europe Program with Slovenian Goga and Croatian Sandorf.

We are thrilled to announce that 2024 is starting on a high note for our agency: Helsinki Literary Agency is a part of Lit-Quest Europe, a project supported by EU Creative Europe Program. This exciting project aims at building and improving the skills of literary agents and enables encounters between literary professionals, locally and internationally.

As part of the project, we join forces with publishing houses and literary agencies Goga Publishing (Slovenia) and Sandorf (Croatia) in launching an Open Call for the Literary Professionals Residence Program for 2024.

The Literary Professionals Residence Program for 2024 is open to welcome a total of 9 literary professionals, both literary agents and editors, from all eligible countries. The fellows will participate in a residency either in Novo Mesto (Slovenia), Zagreb (Croatia) or here in Helsinki. Each residency will have a duration of 5 days and will be scheduled between June 1st and November 30th, 2024.

The deadline for applications is February 15th 2024, and the link to the application form can be found here. See below the full open call with more information.

Don’t miss out on this fantastic project, and stay tuned!

Open Call for Literary Professionals Residence Program 2024

The Literary Professionals Residence Program is a part of the Lit-Quest Europe project, which is a cooperative initiative involving Publishing House Goga (Slo), Sandorf (Cro), and Helsinki Literary Agency (Fi). The Lit-Quest Europe project receives support from the EU Creative Europe program.

The Literary Professionals Residence Program for 2024 is open to welcome literary agents and editors from all eligible countries within the EACEA program:

EU Countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden.
Non-EU Countries: Albania, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Liechtenstein, North Macedonia, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom.

The program particularly emphasizes literary professionals who possess extensive experience in their field, are accustomed to delivering lectures, and are proficient in the English language. We aim to enable the participation of literary professionals of all ages and genders, with a common criterion: their knowledge will have a meaningful impact on the countries of their residence. For the year 2024, the call for applications is open for 9 literary professionals. Each residency will have a duration of 5 days, scheduled between June 1st and November 30th, 2024.

Number of Residencies:
• Goga Publishing (Slovenia – Novo mesto): 3 residencies
• Sandorf (Croatia – Zagreb): 3 residencies
• Helsinki Literary Agency (Finland – Helsinki): 3 residencies

The fellowship for literary professionals will include:
• A 5-night stay in an apartment
• Travel costs (up to 500 EUR)
• Accommodation costs (up to 150 EUR per night)
• Subsistence costs (50 EUR per person)
• Lecture Fee (300 EUR)
• Selected literary professionals will be required to complete a questionnaire provided by
literary agents who are also part of this project.
• Lectures will be recorded and disseminated on the project page.
• All literary professionals will have the opportunity to meet local literary professionals of the host country and other individuals from the publishing field.

The application should include:
• A concise Curriculum Vitae
• Full contact information (phone number and email address)
• Information about the field of profession
• Photograph (for promotional purposes)
• Consent statement regarding the recording of the lecture
All application materials should be submitted in English. The application deadline is February 15th 2024.

The selection will be conducted by the Board of the Lit-Quest Europe Project.
For additional questions regarding the call, please contact via email: lit-quest@goga.si.
Applicants will be notified of the jury’s decision via email by Thursday, February 22th, 2024.

You can find the application on the following link: https://forms.gle/ainK6og4nGgmK9mE8