Wonderful news for Finland’s queen of crime Eva Frantz: Sekwa will start publishing her acclaimed Anna Glad series in Sweden!
Eva Frantz
foto: Marica Rosengård
The publisher has acquired the rights for the third book in the series, Out of the Game (2020). The books, focusing on the police investigator Anna Glad, has been a critical and commercial success, selling nearly 40,000 copies altogether and receiving much praise from the crime fans. Moreover, the second Anna Glad book, The Eighth Maiden (2018), was awarded as the best crime novel of the year in 2019 and nominated for the prestigious Glass Key Award.
Sekwa is a Swedish publishing house specialising in translated contemporary literature. Founded in 2005, it has a strong list of well-written, entertaining and captivating literature.
One of the major newspapers in Finland, Hufvudstadsbladet, has stated about The Blue Villa:
“Last year, Eva Frantz proved her significant talent as a cozy crime fiction author with her book Summer Isle. […] In The BlueVilla she has taken a further step in combining premeditated horrors with the aptly portrayed everyday life. […] She has limitless skill in describing petty crime – from just-about legal malice and revenge to browbeating your family with shitty behaviour.”
About The Eighth Maiden, the paper has stated:
“The crime plot is skillfully intertwined with a moral core. (…) Frantz is prompt and manages to capture something that is puzzling and frightening at the same time. (…) The Eighth Maiden explores the themes of abuse and sexual exploitation of young people, as well as the vicious culture of physical abuse that flourishes everywhere where there is money and power.”
Previously this year, World English rights for Frantz’s ghost and horror story for the middle grade readers, Raspberry Hill, were sold to Pushkin Press.
Congratulations to the author and the lucky crime fans in Sweden!
Finlandia Junior Prize winning RADIO POPOV by Anja Portin is getting a huge amount of attention, with an ongoing auction in Russia and an offer from Italy on the table.
Only a week has passed from the Finlandia Junior Prize celebration where Anja Portin’s middle-grade novel RADIO POPOV was awarded as the best children’s book of 2020, and the book has already found its way to the hearts of many European children’s book publishers. The rights of the warm-hearted adventure story, compared to such classics as Roald Dahl and Astrid Lindgren, has been so far sold to
Bulgaria, Perseus Denmark, Staarup & co. Estonia, Ühinenud ajakirjad Latvia, Janis Roze Lithuania, Alma littera Netherlands, Ploegsma.
And there is more to come, as there is an ongoing auction in Russia and a fresh offer from Italy on the table – and loads of interest from other areas!
You can read more about the book here, and more about the author here.
Anu Kaaja’s latest novel Katie-Kate(2020) has been awarded Kalevi Jäntti Prize 2020.
Katie-Kate (2020)
The jury stated: “Anu Kaaja’s Katie-Kate confuses even the most hard-core readers. What is the meaning of this provocative porn novel? What right has the author have to rub all this vocabulary, these images and this kind of material on our faces? Why should we get interested in a collage which combines princess fairy tales, celebrity culture and internet porn?
Anu Kaaja’s disturbing novel requires concentrating and overcoming the urge to reject it, but little by little it shows its integrity. An angry, feminist analysis of class and gender arise from the obscene carnivalism. Katie-Katie is, no doubt, an intellectual manifestation against the patriarchy, but what makes it an interesting novel is the sovereign and unscrupulous way it makes different genres collide with one another. The result is a sharp mixture, in which the most important ingredient is humour, sometimes incorrect and self-conscious. Katie-Kate is an outstanding, bold and original novel.”
In Katie-Kate, the stories of Kate Middleton, Katie Price and Princess Diana intertwine with main stream porn. A sharp societal analysis reveals a world in which Disney owns nostalgy, Pornhub owns lust and independent women choose to be enslaved princesses.
Anu Kaaja (Photo: Saara Salmi)
Kaaja says she’s grown up in an age when the roles women play in media have changed a lot in a short time. “The strong female characters that have become visible in entertainment have not shifted the focus from the looks and appearances. In Katie-Kate I deal with learned misogyny, the work it takes to maintain good looks, ‘Disney brainwashing’ and my mixed relationship with marriage as an institution.”
Anu Kaaja (b. 1984) is an author and scriptwriter. Her debut novel Metamorphoslip(2015) was awarded with Jarkko Laine Prize and nominated for Helsingin Sanomat Literary Award. Her second novel Leda(2017) won Toisinkoinen literature prize and was nominaterd for Runeberg Award.
November is ending with one more exciting success: author Marisha Rasi-Koskinen was awarded Torch-Bearer Prize for her new novel REC!
Torch-Bearer Prize, otherwise called the Finnish Literary Export Award, is given every year to a title that is believed to have the most potential to succeed abroad. The award sum is 5000 euros.
As the jury and its chairman Kjell Westö stated about the book:
“The novel masterfully plays with various levels of time and place, the storytelling, as well as concepts of images and filming. The book is extraordinary in its abundance of internal stories that form the whole. The centre of it is a friendship that starts at a young age and involves many mysteries, addictions and traumas.“
REC is an atmospheric, post-modern dive into the fragmented reality we are living today. When teenager Lucas meets a peculiar boy named Cole, it is a start of a decades-long on-and-off friendship, where real and fictional characters are present simultaneously, where images and stories begin many times, in various places, and where dark, possessive and manipulating side of humans take over with irrevocable outcomes – unless… nothing is true. As the author herself describes the book, “it is a love letter to fiction”, where the reality is not unambiguous and the understanding of it is rather formed in people’s minds, stories and images.
Marisha Rasi-Koskinen has published six works of fiction. In 2019, her first YA book The Dark Side of the Sunwon the most prestigious literary prize of the year, Finlandia Junior.
HLA could not be more thrilled: both our nominees for the most important literary award of the year have won! Anni Kytömäki’s novel Margarita won Finlandia Prize for the best fiction book of the year and Anja Portin’s novel Radio Popov won Finlandia Junior, given to the best children’s and YA book.
Kytömäki’s novel Margarita portrays the destinies of forests and people in post-war Finland. It is a powerful, sensual and multilayered call to ponder the price that the building of a welfare state demands from an individual. This year’s chooser of the winner, conductor Hannu Lintu, has stated:
“The language and the storytelling of the book grip the readers and carry them away. It is not only a masterful portrayal of that ground zero point where the growth of the modern Finnish society has begun, but also of the struggle of an individual in the midst of unbelievable twists and turns that this growth brings upon. The book shows that every battle – let it be war or reconstruction – claims its victims. We know that these struggles for the better future are still present today.”
In her speech, Anni Kytömäki emphasised the critical state of our world:
“I have dedicated this book to the silent ones of water and earth – the ones that are in danger to be left behind in our society and in the face of [the global] ecological crisis. In my opinion, this Finlandia Prize shows that there is still room for diversity – that is, for the wide spectrum of characters and nature beings.“
The winner of Finlandia Junior Prize,Anja Portin’s novel Radio Popov is a book about loneliness, friendship and the power of storytelling. A warm adventure story brings to mind such children’s literature classics as Roald Dahl and Astrid Lindgren, but at the same time is also compelling for the adult readers.
The chooser of the prize, actor Christoffer Strandberg has written in his statement:
“I have always believed that a good book for children or young people is one that you can return to throughout your life, always finding new perspectives and realising that it has been at the heart of the matter all along. This is such a book. (…)
The book’s world – its time and place – fascinates me. It succeeds in being timeless while also being completely of our time. Radio Popov is a fantastical tale, but also a heart-rending story about humanity anchored in reality. The world and its people are not seen through a black-and-white filter. The parents of the forgotten children are not demonised. This is not a story about the struggle between good and evil. This is a story that focuses on the good in the small and in the large, in spite of all evil.”
In her speech, Anja Portin thanked the jury for the honour and talked, among other things, about the various colours of silence and the power of fiction in our everyday lives:
“Literature can give space to those, whose voice disappears among noises of the world. Especially important these days feels the ability of literature to evoke compassion and show the different colours of the world, not only the black and white.“
Foreign rights of Radio Popov have so far been sold to Denmark, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Finlandia Prize is the most important literary award in Finland, given annually in three categories: the best novel, the best children’s or YA book and the best nonfiction book of the year. The award sum is 30,000 euros.
Warm congratulations, Anni and Anja, their present and future readers and translators!
Previously, several other HLA’s authors have received the award in the category of the best novel, including Kari Hotakainen (The Trench Road, 2002) Pirkko Saisio (The Red Letter of Farewell, 2003) Mikko Rimminen (Red Nose Day, 2010) Ulla-Lena Lundberg (Ice, 2012) Riikka Pelo (Our Earthly Life, 2013) Jukka Viikilä (Watercolours from a Seaside City, 2016) and Juha Hurme (Headland, 2017)
Finlandia Junior Prize has been previously awarded to 4 HLA authors:
Tomi Kontio (In the Spring, Dad Got Wings, 2000) Vilja-Tuulia Huotarinen (Light, Light, Light, 2011) Sanna Mander (The Lost Key, 2017) Marisha Rasi-Koskinen (The Dark Side of the Sun, 2019)
