Author: Urpu Strellman

Poet Niillas Holmberg has received Kirsi Kunnas poetry award, given out every second year to the authors of bold, vivid and influencal modern poetry.

The jury described Holmberg, a prominent figure in the Sami culture, and his poetry as intermediaries between two worlds:

“Niillas Holmberg (b. 1990) is a poet, musician, actor and activist from [the northern Finnish area of] Utsjoki, well-known in all the Sami area. Holmberg is also known as an interpreter from the Sami culture into the modern western world and back. […] Holmberg’s poetry is diffuse and it crosses language boundaries. In it, the concepts of locality and tradition are intertwined with universal themes. Holmberg tries to remember things that have been forced to be forgotten but are still trying to surface. Identity and the recognition of the relationship between men and the nature are the central themes in his works.”

Niillas Holmberg’s sixth collection Underfoot was published last year to a wide critical acclaim. The jury stated:

“The poetry of Holmberg’s latest collection Underfoot (2019) is political and combatant. With smooth strokes, it succeeds in diagnosing the oblivion and the wrongfulness of the modern world and in giving hope of a better future.”

Click the links to read more about the Underfoot and the author.

The best Finnish crime novel of 2019, Eighth Maiden by Eva Frantz, is a nominee for the best Nordic crime novel.

The five novels competing for the best Scandinavian crime novel prize Glass Key Award are Eva Frantz with The Eighth Maiden (Finland), Camilla Grebe with Skuggjägaren (Sweden), Gretellise Holm with Dødfunden (Denmark), Jo Nesbø with Kniv (Norway) and Lilja Sigurðardóttir with Svik (Iceland).

The Eight Maiden was awarded with the best crime novel of the year prize in Finland, and it was a nominee for the Torch-bearer Prize too. (Read the news here and here.) Second novel starred by police officer Anna Glad, The Eight Maiden shows Eva Frantz as the top of her craft. The multi-layered, chilling novel about the past evils working their way to the present has been both the critics’ and the audience’s favourite.

Just out with a new Anna Glad novel, Out of the Game, Eva Frantz has established herself as one of the top crime authors in Finland. In addition to four crime novels, she has written a middle-grade horror novel Raspberry Hill, awarded with the Runeberg Junior Prize (read the news here).

Read more about Eva Frantz from her author presentation and interview.

Novels by Eva Frantz:

Summer Isle (2016)
The Blue Villa (2017, Anna Glad #1)
The Eighth Maiden (2018, Anna Glad #2)
Out of the Game (2020, Anna Glad #3)
Raspberry Hill (children’s novel, 2018)

One of the most beautiful Finlandia Prize winning novels ever, Ulla-Lena Lundberg’s ICE has been acquired to Poland by Marpress.

The eight foreign rights deal for Ice was done via Book/lab Literary Agency in Poland.

One of the all-time bestsellers in Finland with over 100,000 copies sold, Ulla-Lena Lundberg’s masterpiece has been previously published in English by Sort of Books, in German by Mare Verlag, in Bulgarian by Izida, in Croatian by Hena com, in Danish by Gyldendal, in Estonian by Eesti Raamat and in Hungarian by Széphalon Könyvmuhely.

The novel tells about a novice Lutheran priest, his wife and baby daughter arriving at a windswept island off the coast of Finland right after the war, in 1946. There they encounter the islanders, a self-sufficient community of fisher folk, and little by little, year by year they get rooted in the unadorned landscape.

“It is a grand novel. You can read it as a gripping story of people and their fates, as a condensation of the tensions in a community, but also as an allegory of the mankind.”
– Aamulehti newspaper

The Arabic rights of Selja Ahava’s Things that Fall from the Sky have been acquired by Egyptian Cultural Assembly, making it 24th foreign sales for the title.

Selja Ahava’s European Union Prize for Literature winning novel Things that Fall from the Sky will be published in Arabic by Egyptian Cultural Assembly.

The novel tells a story of a girl whose mother dies under a block of ice falling from the sky, of a woman who wins the jackpot twice and of a man hit by a lightning for five times. It has been described a whimsical and thoughtful literary fairy tale.

The rights have been previously been sold to Albania (IDK); Armenia (Guitank); Bulgaria (Colibri); China (Citic); Croatia (Vuković & Runjić); Czech Republic (Pavel Dobrovský – Beta); Denmark (Jensen & Dalgaard); World English (Oneworld); Estonia (Post Factum | Eesti Meedia); France (Bleu & Jaune); Georgia (Agora); Germany (Mare Verlag); Hungary (Typotex); Latvia (Lauku Avize); Lithuania (Homo liber); Macedonia (Magor); Poland (Relacja); Serbia (Štrik); Slovenia (KUD Sodobnost International); Spanish (Editorial Bercimuel); Swedish (Bakhall); Turkey (Timas) and Ukraine (V. Books XXi).

A Dog Called Cat finds a home in Estonia.

The Estonian rights of the beautiful and beloved children’s book A Dog Called Cat with its sequel A Dog Called Cat meets a Cat have been sold to the Estonian publisher Päike ja pilv.

Poet Tomi Kontio’s illustrator Elina Warsta’s A Dog Called Cat is a story about a small dog, a man called Weasel and about a friendship that changes everything.

The rights have been previously sold to Lata de Sal in Spain and Nieko Rimto in Lithuania.