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Rotopol has acquired the German rights to The Natural Comedy by Ulla Donner, marking the second foreign deal for this title.

The Natural Comedy by Ulla Donner continues its journey into the international literary scene as its German rights have been acquired by Rotopol.

In The Natural Comedy it’s autumn, and the leaves have started to fall. One of them, a leaf called Birch, makes a crash landing on a mushroom, Candy, while en route to the Great Autumn Feast. The unlikely duo start a perilous journey through the forest, or rather what is left of it, trying to make it to the party in time. The Natural Comedy is a playful twist on Dante’s Divine Comedy from the perspective of the creatures of a forest that has been destroyed by humans’ exploitation.

As Birch and Candy make their way through the destroyed forest in Dantean fashion, they roam through artificially modified natural reserves, coming across the ancient, grimy Mother Nature, a wellness cult headed by a Kombucha mushroom, as well as other woodland dwellers forced to adapt to their new habitats. The Natural Comedy is the third work of Ulla Donner, winner of the Finlandia Comics Prize for Best Graphic Novel in 2020. The sylvan fairytale grows into a hilarious satire about the Finns’ “special” relationship with nature. It is a tale about a society in which nature is subordinate to the human pursuit of profit and in which heaven and hell are only separated by how well each species manages to fit around people’s needs. The author also touches on xenophobia, comical features of young people’s dating rituals, and the societal terror of old age and hagsploitation in her characteristically wry manner. 

Rotopol is a publishing house for graphic storytelling located in Kassel, Germany. Their list includes comics, picture books, art prints, sketchbooks, and more.

Warm congratulations to the author and the publishers!

Border To Border by Jussi Niemeläinen is travelling to Estonia, where it will be published by Postimees.

Border To Border by Jussi Niemeläinen is starting its journey out into the world as Postimees has secured the Estonian rights to this title.

Border To Border is a reportage that explores the western border of Russia. Stretching from northern Norway to eastern Ukraine, this border has been loaded with a historical meaning that has changed throughout the years: from the Cold War, to the dissolution of the USSR, to the contemporary war in Ukraine and Russia’s attempt at moving the border.

Focusing on the contemporary history of Russia and the Western countries it shares a border with, author Jussi Niemeläinen has written Border To Border drawing from his long experience as journalist and foreign correspondent.

Postimees is one of Estonia’s leading publishing houses, with a list ranging from non-fiction to literary and commercial fiction, and children’s literature. They are the Estonian publisher of, among others, Julia Quinn, Anthony Gottlieb, Douglas Stuart, and John Irving. In Finland, Border To Border has been published by Siltala.

Congratulations to the author and the publisher, and don’t miss out on this title!

Beasts of the Sea by Iida Turpeinen continues to enchant critics and readers: the book has scored a glowing review on the New York Times newspaper, penned by Alida Becker.

Becker was an editor at the Book Review for 30 years and is the first winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for excellence in reviewing, and she approaches Beasts of the Sea highlighting how despite being set in the past, the story carries weight even into the present day. In Becker’s words “this eloquent, impassioned novel uses the demise of a gentle mammal to chart mankind’s evolution from arrogant explorer of nature to “as great a threat as an asteroid or a flood” to other species. You can find the full review here on the New York Times website.

Beasts of the Sea is a literary achievement and a breathtaking adventure through three centuries that approaches natural diversity through individual destinies. Steller’s sea cow, a sirenian lost to extinction centuries ago, is revived on the pages and is the red thread that ties together the individual fates of a group of people throughout the centuries. The novel won multiple awards, and was nominated for the Finlandia Prize domestically, and ran as the Best Foreign Book of the Year in France in 2024, and for the Premio Strega in Italy earlier this year. In Finland Beasts of the Sea is published by Kustantamo S&S. In December 2025, Beasts of the Sea was chosen as Stephen Colbert’s Late Show Book Club book of the month. In the US, it is out with Little, Brown.

Warmest congratulations to the author and the publisher!

Goga has secured the Slovenian rights to Destruction by Iida Rauma, marking the fifth foreign language territory for this title.

Iida Rauma’s Destruction, the winner of Finlandia Prize 2022, is travelling to Slovenia, where it will be published by Goga.

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 always tend to exercise their power on the weaker ones.

The book follows A, a young teacher and bullying survivor, whose past catches up with her during a nightly jog around the city of Turku. A familiar figure triggers a series of memories and events that take A on a deep dive into the personal destruction she escaped, into the collective destruction suffered by her city in the past, and the one suffered by our planet’s ecosystem right now.

Goga is a Slovenian publishing house based in Novo Mesto whose list includes a broad variety of domestic and international fiction and non-fiction. They are the publisher of author and crime-fiction sensation Tadej Golob, and the Slovenian home to international authors Hugo Pratt, Thomas Mann, Fernando Pessoa, and J.L. Carr, among others.

Warm congratulations to the author and the publisher!

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 5^th, 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. Among the nominees is also author Niillas Holmberg, with his latest work of poetry, Naarattu.

The jury 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!