News

The Finlandia Prize winner of 2016, Jukka Viikilä’s Watercolours from a Seaside City, has been sold to Serbian Akademska Knjiga.

The publishing house was founded in July 2006 with the aim of publishing scholarly works of domestic and foreign authors who write on the social science and the humanities. Since then, Akademska Knjiga’s list has widened to fiction, their goal being to publish books of permanent value which will enlarge the readers’ knowledge of the present but also be of interest to the generations to come. They are the publishers of eg. Mathias Enard, Emmanuel Carrere, Patrick Modiano, and Joseph Brodsky.

Watercolours from a Seaside City is a fictive diary of a German architect, Carl Ludwig Engel, who was commissioned by the Russian emperor to build the capital of Finland in the beginning of the 19th century. The novel has been praised of its lyrical touch and aphoristical observations of life. The novel has so far sold over 43,000 copies in Finland.

Katarina Baer’s They Were Nazis, the winner of Bonnier’s Grand Prize of Journalism as the best book of the year, has been sold to Post Factum in Estonia.

Post Factum, owned by the largest media group in the Baltic states, Eesti Meedia, that publishes for example the Estonian newspaper Postimees, is a new publishing house with a growing list of quality literature by Estonian and international authors. They are the Estonian publishers of eg. the latest Finlandia Prize winner Jukka Viikila, the European Union Prize for Literature winner Selja Ahava, and the huge international television success, J. M. Ilves’ Bordertown books.

They Were Nazis tells the story of the author’s Baltic German grandparents – a personal, thoroughly researched story of how good people turned nazis.

Helsinki Literary Agency will be at the first ever Milan Book Fair! We’ll be in the rights center at the table D02 – looking forward to seeing you there!

Oneworld Publications has bought the World English rights of Selja Ahava’s European Union Prize for Literature 2016 winning novel Things that Fall from the Sky, and they have optioned Ahava’s upcoming novel Before My Husband Disappears.

Oneworld Publications is the winner of the Man Booker Prize 2015 and 2016, the British Book Industry’s Independent Publisher of the Year Award 2016 and the IPG Trade Publisher of the Year Award 2016. It is a boutique, high-quality independent publisher committed to building a list of intelligent, thought-provoking, and distinctive fiction that sits at the intersection of the literary and the commercial: beautifully written novels showcasing emotionally engaging stories, strong narratives and original literary voices.

HLA congratulates both the author and the publisher!

Journalist Katarina Baer’s praised book They Were Nazis has been awarded as the Book of the Year in Bonnier’s competition for the Grand Prize of Journalism. The jury stated that the book, published in 2016 and raved about by the critics, asks the big questions:

“Would you be carried away by the tenor of the times, an era where selective truths and hard partisan propaganda hold sway for years? It’s hard to understand our grandparents’ world view and actions, but you must build your own life despite the ghosts of the past. A work based on careful research, personal experience and asks difficult questions.”

Read the news in English from here.