FILI - Spotlight

Focus on Finnish Writers

Our Spotlight series of reports designed especially for publishers and translators has moved to the site of Books from Finland online journal. This website features archive material from 2007—2008.

Spotlights 2007-2008

A gypsy never quits

Veijo Baltzar (b. 1942) has constructed a solid, full-blooded tale of Romani beliefs and customs built on a foundation of grim reality. Read more...

Robert Åsbacka:
The Organ-Builder

Robert Åsbacka can describe concrete objects, materials, work processes, different environments – and the emotional and intellectual dimensions contained within them. Read more...

From modernism
to flarf

There are perhaps more voices in Finnish poetry today than ever before.

A body and a blowfly

Sofi Oksanen’s (b. 1977) third novel Puhdistus (WSOY, 2008), is a lurid history of women in Soviet Estonia.

From problem realism
to polymorphous fantasy

2006 and 2007 Finnish books for young adults.

A glimpse of all that creeps along the ground and twinkles in the sky

Selection of Finnish non-fiction for children and young people since 2000.

Extracts from the quarterly journal Books from Finland

Marie Myhrborgh was born in Strasbourg on the last day of the 19th century. A hundred years later she is living her last days in a Finnish nursing home. In his first novel Marie Arne Nevanlinna (born 1924) follows his protagonist’s associations and reminiscences, searching for a vanished time in the landscapes of her childhood and her later life in Finland. Read more...

Sirpa Kähkönen

In June 1941 Soviet planes bombed Kuopio; in her novel Lakanasiivet ('Linen wings', Otava, 2007) , which takes place over a single day, Sirpa Kähkönen paints a vivid picture of a country town at war. Read more...

Tuomas Kyrö

The fourth novel by Tuomas Kyrö (born 1974), Benjamin Kivi (WSOY, 2007), stretches the boundaries of realism with its tale of a 100-year-old adventurer, written in the style of a memoir.