The nation’s top literary awards, the 40th annual Finlandia Prizes, were handed out at a gala ceremony in Helsinki on Thursday evening, with the winners assured strong sales in the run-up to Christmas.
The main prize for fiction, worth 30,000 euros, went to Sirpa Kähkönen for her novel 36 uurnaa – Väärässä olemisen historia (roughly translated as "36 Urns: The History of Being Wrong").
Kähkönen, 59, began her career by publishing two young-adult novels in the early ‘90s. She moved on to a nine-part series of novels set in her native town of Kuopio, eastern Finland, which appeared between 1998 and 2021, along with several other novels, non-fiction books, plays and translations.
She chaired the Union of Finnish Writers for a four-year term that ended last year, worked as an editor at one of the country’s biggest publishers, Otava, and has won a string of previous awards.
Her latest, intensely personal, book was inspired by her mother’s death last year, and has been described as starkly different from her earlier output. The title refers to space for 36 urns in her family’s columbarium.
The winner was chosen by choreographer Jorma Uotinen, who called it, an "insightful, confessional masterpiece".
The three Finlandia prizes are each selected by an individual judge, making the ultimate choice one person’s subjective opinion. The shortlists of up to six nominees in each category are picked by expert juries named by the Finnish Book Foundation.
The other shortlisted authors for the main prize included two other women, Laura Gustafsson and Iida Turpeinen, and three men: Antti Hurskainen, Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen and Miki Liukkonen.
The latter nomination was exceptional in that it was posthumous. Liukkonen, who was also a rock musician and talk show host, died in July at the age of 33 after speaking openly about his struggle with mental health issues. His fifth novel, the 550-page Vierastila ("Guest Mode"), was published in September and won the public vote for this year’s Finlandia. A previous novel was short-listed for the prize in 2017.
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Young-adult horror and a WW2 mystery
The Finlandia prize for children's and young adult literature went to Magdalena Hai for her horror-fantasy tale Sarvijumala ("Horned God"), which also won the public vote in that category. She has previously published 10 books for kids and teenagers as well as steampunk-influenced short stories.
The non-fiction prize was awarded to journalist Antti Järvi for his book Mihin katosi Antti Järvi? (roughly "Whatever Happened to Antti Järvi?"), based on the murky fate of his great-grandfather, who shared the same name and decided to stay in a part of Karelia that was ceded to the Soviet Union after the Winter War of 1939-40.
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