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Fig Tree Publishing, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK, has secured the World English rights to He Who Saw The Deep by Selja Ahava, marking the fourth foreign deal for this title.

A wonderful beginning of autumn for our author Selja Ahava, who’s 2025 novel He Who Saw The Deep continues its journey out into the world: Fig Tree Publishing, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK, has secured the World English rights to this title.

Acquiring editor Ella Harold has stated: “I’m incredibly excited about He Who Saw The Deep, and the prospect of publishing Selja Ahava’s remarkable new novel at Fig Tree. It’s a wonderful novel: mesmerising, ambitious, and deeply humane, so broad in its sources of inspiration, but so compelling and readable.” In her vision, He Who Saw The Deep can be placed on the shelves of readers of Jon Fosse, Annie Ernaux, Solvej Balle, and especially Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, and Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease To Understand The World, in which, much like in He Who Saw The Deep, the literary whole consists of a mosaic of literary, cultural, and scientific references.

Fig Tree is an imprint with a sharp and ambitious eye for translated fiction. Under its roof, Ahava joins the ranks of Swedish author Andrev Walden and his bestselling, August Prize-winning novel, Bloody Awful in Different Ways (Jävla Karlar), and Martina Hefter, and her Deutscher Buchpreis-winning novel Hey, Good Morning. Fig Tree is also home for Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon and I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There by Róisín Lanigan.

In He Who Saw the Deep, award-winning author Selja Ahava writes about two of the most human feelings: love and fear of death. Liisa is a middle-aged woman in whose family people seldom live to old age. When she meets the love of her life, it is evident that their time together is limited. When her only living older relative falls deathly ill, Liisa is forced to grapple with the inevitability of death, and she begins to collect and write stories that give her a chance to explore the idea of mortality and the pursuit of immortality. The stories follow situations where the line between life and death, the dead and the living, is walked, observed, and redrawn. The fragments of stories are weaved together, resulting in a modern rhapsody held together by Liisa’s own story. The book is published in Finland by Gummerus, and has already travelled to Denmark, Hungary, and Poland.

Selja Ahava (b. 1974), author and dramaturg, is one of the most prominent voices in contemporary Finnish fiction. Her second novel, Things that Fall from the Sky (2015), is a winner of the European Union Prize for Literature 2016, and a nominee of the Finlandia Prize and the Torch-bearer Prize; foreign rights of this novel have been sold to 28 territories.

Congratulations to the author for this wonderful deal!

Fantastic week for Finnish fiction: Pirkko Saisio’s Helsinki Trilogy was named among the best recently translated fiction by The Guardian’s John Self. The books are translated into English by Mia Spangenberg.

Self describes The Red Book of Farewells, the final part in the trilogy, as “clear prose” that “playfully shifts between third and first person” and concludes that “this enchanting series deserves to become a modern classic”. Helsinki Trilogy is published in the UK by Penguin Random House.

Earlier this year, also Financial Times ran a piece on the trilogy, calling it “a Finnish masterpiece of autofiction”.

Saisio’s trilogy has already travelled to 14 territories, becoming one of the most successful modern classics from Finland in the recent years and garnering prestigious accolades on the way. The autofictional books carry the reader through the childhood, adolescence and adulthood of a girl who wanted to be a boy and started calling herself “her” when she was eight years of age.

The strong themes of the trilogy – the relationship between an individual and the society, sexuality and being queer, and finding your voice – are told in a fragmentary, lyrical style, descriptive of Saisio. As the background, there is Helsinki, changing as the decades go by.

Wonderful news for our graphic novel department: two new deals have been finalised for The Natural Comedy by Ulla Donner!

World Spanish rights have been acquired by Liana Editorial, while the French rights were secured by Atrabile. The latter previously published Donner’s graphic novel Crap.

Both publishers specialise in comics and quality graphic novels: Liana has released the works of Nora Dåsnes, Adam O. and Jenny Jordahl, while Atrabile is the home for Frederik Peeters, Jason, Alex Baladi, Ibn Al Rabin, Peggy Adam and many others.

The Natural Comedy is a playful twist on Dante’s Divine Comedy, told from the perspective of the creatures of a forest that has been destroyed by humans. In it, 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 on time.

As Birch and Candy try to make their way à la Dante, they come 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 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 such themes as xenophobia, comical features of young people’s dating rituals, and the societal terror of old age and hagsploitation in her characteristically wry manner. 

The Natural Comedy is the third graphic novel of Ulla Donner, winner of the Finlandia Comics Prize for Best Graphic Novel in 2020. Foreign rights of the book have previously been sold to Germany and Poland.

Warm congratulations to the author and the publishers!

Things That Fall From the Sky by Selja Ahava is travelling to Japan, where it will be published by Kawade Shobo Shinsa

Wonderful news: Things That Fall From the Sky by Selja Ahava is travelling to Japan, where it will be published by Kawade Shobo Shinsa, marking the 29th foreign language territory for this title.

Things That Fall From The Sky tells the story of a combination of extremely unlikely events: it follows a little girl whose mother is killed by a block of ice falling from the sky, her aunt who wins the lottery twice and then falls into a weeks-long sleep, and a man who has been struck by lightning five times. Things That Fall From The Sky is a literary, touching, unconventional fairytale about how life demands to be lived, no matter what absurd events may befall people.

Selja Ahava is an acclaimed Finnish author, dramaturge, and scriptwriter. All her novels have been received with glowing reviews and award nominations and wins. Her works are published in Finland by Gummerus.

Kawade Shobo Shinsha is one of Japan’s leading publishers of books and has secured the rights in a deal brought to us by Tuttle Mori Literary Agency. Kawade Shobo Shinsha have over a century of experience in the publishing industry, having started in 1886. They have since then been the home of domestic bestsellers like Amy Yamada’s “Bed Time-Eyes” (1985) and Machi Tawara’s “Salad Memorial Day”(1987) and of international authors of high profile like Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Vladmir Nabokov, Desmond Morris, and our very own Iida Turpeinen, among others.

Warm congratulations to the author and the publisher!