Zona 42 has secured the Italian rights to Tainaron by Leena Krohn, marking the 14th foreign language territory for this title.
Tainaron (Tainaron, 1985)
Wonderful news: Tainaron: Mail from Another City by Leena Krohn is travelling to Italy, where it will be published by Zona 42. Tainaron is an adventure taking place in a city inhabited by human-sized insects. The narrator talks about the city, its curious creatures and their enchanting lives. Letter by letter, little by little, also the narrator starts to blend into the city’s collective mind. Tainaron has been named as one of the most important works of post-World War II dark fantasy and was a nominee for several literary prizes.
Leena Krohn is a modern classic of Finnish literature. Her extensive body of work draws from fantasy and sci-fi, each and every novel dodging presumptions and excelling expectations.
Zona 42 is an independent publisher whose list focuses on a selection of sci-fi, speculative and genre-bending fiction.
Warm congratulations to the author and the publisher!
The Silk Road North series by Anu Ojala has now sold over 60.000 copies in Finland alone.
Exciting news from our crime list: the Silk Road North series by Anu Ojala has sold over 60.000 copies in Finland, consolidating its position as a readers’ favourite and a top-tier series in its genre.
Author Anu Ojala
The series follows twin city Tornio-Haparanda, on the Swedish-Finnish border in Lapland, has been plagued by a crime wave which keeps claiming new victims. Sergeant Ronja Jentzch investigates murders that lead to the trail of a dangerous synthetic drug. As police feverishly work on the case, a more complex web of connections is revealed, and international meddling becomes a part of the picture.
Among the strengths of the series are the credible portrayal of investigative procedures as well as characters that are written with depth and compassion. In Ojala’s books, crimes are often created by desperate circumstances and committed by people just like us, who are simply looking for a way to a better life. At the same time, the tension remains until the last pages of each book, and the fact that the investigation expands and deepens with each part of the trilogy gives the books a quality of a high-calibre, bingeable TV series. The rights to the series have been pre-empted in Germany by Droemer Knaur.
Anu Ojala (b.1972) is an author and lawyer living in Rovaniemi in the Finnish Lapland who knows the background of the Arctic drug war well. She has worked in a law firm and at the University of Lapland, and has previously written novels for young readers. The Silk Road North series is published in Finland by Gummerus.
Warm congratulations to the author and the publisher on this wonderful success, and don’t miss out on this title!
Professor Henrik Meinander has been awarded with the Karl Emil Tollander Award and the Tollanderska Medal by the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland.
Helsinki. Story of a City
Another accolade is in for one of our most prominent non-fiction authors Henrik Meinander: he has been awarded the Karl Emil Tollander Prize, worth 50.000 euros, and the Tollanderska Medal by the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland for his latest book Helsinki. Story of a City.
The Karl Emil Tollander Award, is the largest award given by the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland, and is handed out at the SLS Annual Celebration on 5 February. The award is given in recognition to a literary or scientific lifetime achievement and is one of the awards boasting the largest monetary value in the Nordics, and has been awarded since 1913.
The Society has stated “in his academic career Henrik Meinander has combined influential scientific contributions with elegant historiography for a broad audience. Helsinki. Story of a City is an excellent example of this. With a steady hand Meinander brings to life his beloved home city’s history. He carries the reader through Helsinki’s growth and its soon five-centuries-long development, formed by the changing forces of the surroundings and geopolitics. Meinander also admirably depicts how the soul of a city is created mostly by the people who live in it, the language and living conditions, the street life, the architecture, and the culture.”
Henrik Meinander
In Helsinki. Story a City Henrik Meinander, one of Finland’s most prominent historians, explores the development of the Finnish capital from a tiny fishing village to a contemporary Nordic metropolis, placing the events that characterized the city in a broader historical context.
Henrik Meinander (b. 1960) is a professor of history at theUniversity of Helsinki and the author of many acclaimed books on Finnish and Nordic history. He was formerly curator of the Mannerheim Museum in Helsinki and head of the Finnish Institute in Stockholm. His works have been translated into over 10 languages, and are non-fiction bestsellers in Finland
The British edition of Backlight by Pirkko Saisio (Helsinki Trilogy #2) has landed a glowing review on the Financial Times, penned by Ellen Peirson-Hagger.
In it, she highlights the metatextuality of Saisio’s prose and her ability to build a prose that relies on feelings, rather than chronology, to move forward: “Throughout, Saisio writes as though looking through a haze brought on not simply by the passing of time, but by the understanding that it is our dreams and our preoccupations that point us towards the truth of our lives.”
Backlight is the second volume in the world-famous Helsinki Trilogy, that has made Saisio an instant modern classic across Europe and on the other side of the Atlantic. It follows teenage Saisio as she navigates puberty and spends a summer in Switzerland, studying German and living out her The Sound of Music-fantasies. The summer also brings reflections on her artistic future, and tumultuous events all over Europe. The British edition is out as a Penguin Modern Classic, in English translation by Mia Spangenberg, and hit the shelves on February 5th.
Author Pirkko Saisio
The trilogy, which follows Saisio from childhood to middle age, and from curious child to acclaimed artist on the backdrop of an ever-changing Helsinki, has been pre-empted after we picked it to our list in four areas: in Germany by Klett-Cotta, in France by Robert Laffont, in the Netherlands by De Geus, and most recently in the UK and Commonwealth by Penguin to their Penguin Modern Classics list, with Saisio being the first living Finnish author to join their list. The North American English rights have been acquired by Two Lines Press, in Hungary by Polar, in Czech Republic by Host and in Romania by Pandora M (of Editura Trei).
Congratulations to the author, and don’t miss out on this title!
Stop the Thief! by Ulla Donner, A Dog Called Cat Says Farewell by Tomi Kontio & Elina Warsta, and Palestine and Israel. A History in Maps by Timo R. Stewart are running for the Most Beautiful Book of the YearAward.
Each year, the Finnish Book Art Committee selects the most beautiful books published in Finland during the previous year. One title is awarded as the Year’s Most Beautiful Book, and others, organised according to their categories, receive honorary mentions.
A Dog Called Cat Says Farewell (Teos 2025)
Stop the Thief!, penned and illustrated by Ulla Donner, and published by Schildts & Söderströms, is a humorous picture book in rhyme where a dog goes rogue and starts stealing other dogs’ most prized possessions, prompting a chaotic and furry thief hunt. Stop the Thief! is also running for the Runeberg Junior Prize.
A Dog Called Cat Says Farewell by Tomi Kontio & Elina Warsta is designed and illustrated by Elina Warsta, and published by Teos. It is the last chapter in the successful and critically acclaimed A Dog Called Cat series, and has won the Finlandia Junior Prize, the most prestigious children’s literature award in Finland, last autumn. A Dog Called Cat Says Farewell follows friends Cat, Dog, and Weasel as they say goodbye when Weasel embarks on his last journey.
Palestine and Israel. A History in Maps (Gummerus 2025)
Both titles are running in the children’s books category.
Running in the non-fiction category is Palestine and Israel. A History in Maps, by Timo R. Stewart, published by Gummerus and designed by Tuija Tarkiainen from Studio Kiss. In the book, two-times Finlandia nominee and PhD Timo R. Stewart uses a simple yet efficient structure to tackle a complex issue: over the course of the book, he analyzes 25 maps of the geographical area that encompasses Palestine and Israel, encouraging a critical approach to maps and historiography.
Who drew these maps, and with what purpose? Maps are a tool to understand the world, but also a tool of political power and history-making: our ideas of the world and national borders are far from being eternal and set in stone, and exploring their changes and development results in an unusual yet engaging way to approach history with more than skin-deep knowledge. The takeaway is an increased critical eye that can be turned to the different ways conflicts and politics shape the world we live in, in the Middle East and everywhere.
Congratulations to all nominees, authors, publishers, and graphic designers – and fingers crossed!
