Spotlight on Finland-Swedish Literature

Best known for her poetry, Edith Södergran (1892 – 1923) also left a substantial body of photography. In Another Edith, award-winning book designer Nina Ulmaja analyses some of these photos and links them to Södergran’s biography – and her own.

Ulla-Lena Lundberg and Negar Naseh: two women writers from different generations and cultural backgrounds, with voices as distinctive as the settings of their narratives. Their novels Light and Flame and A Handful of Wind offer spell-binding insights into the landscapes of their minds.

A farm in western Finland is passed down through four hundred years of the same family. Inherited Land explores family bonds and traditions, as well as individual personalities and experiences, of generations of the extended Nevabacka family.

You Are Not My Mother and If You Meet a Bear, two new picture books illustrated by Linda Bondestam, have very different narratives and styles, but both reveal an artist at the height of her powers.

Lucid Dreams: A User’s Manual is a collection of stories spanning suburbia, science fiction, loneliness, violence and sheer horror from Johanna Holmström, a past master of uncomfortable writing.

Manda and her best friend Malin are inseparable. In We'll just ride past, it's them against their small-town world... or not so much ‘against’ but outside it, cycling round the periphery of anything thrilling, as the end of the school year looms and with it the end of their compulsory education.

An unconventionally told story of childhood in which photography and aesthetics play a major part, Shade and Breeze is an elusive but absorbing debut novel.

Travelling between Dimension Homesickness and Dimension Viking Line, Edith Hammar's Homo Line is a graphic novel about dislocation, gentrification, and a lesser-known aspect of wartime Helsinki.

As well as being an impeccably researched biography of Märta Tikkanen, a writer who became a Nordic feminist icon, Johanna Holmström’s Ought to shut up – a book about Märta Tikkanen is a dialogue between its author’s 21st-century #metoo feminism and its subject’s feminism of the 1970s and 1980s.

För han var redan dö continues Eva Frantz's skillful series of stand-alone crime novels blending police procedurals with elements of noir, set against a backdrop of the rugged Finnish coast.

The work of Gösta Ågren holds a special place in Finland-Swedish – and Swedish and Finnish – literature. This collection brings together many of his works from the past 60 years.

In this poetry collection Adrian Perera addresses structural racism and hegemonic whiteness, combining the power of poetry with the realism of a narrative.

With Maresi Red Mantle Maria Turtschaninoff confirms her status as an internationally renowned author of fantasy.

The first in a new fantasy quartet by award-winning Finland-Swedish author Karin Erlandsson.

Hannah Lutz's Wild Boar questions ‘[...] which species, which animals and which people are welcome where? And who decides that?’

Rattle Rustle Walk is a lovely collection of poetry that is just right for young readers and they, like the tree in winter with its leaves falling, will be sad when it is over.

Peter Sandström's Autumn Apples is a masterpiece of understatement, a brilliantly laconic portrait of the sad vicissitudes of life.

Although The Sulphur-Yellow Sky begins with a crime, it is not about uncovering a mystery. More than that, it asks how complicit are those who watch, who are involved but not involved, who see but do nothing.

Ann-Luise Bertell's debut is ‘A pocket-sized emigrant epic’

Korta Stycken, a slim volume of short stories, flash fiction and poetry, is a masterclass in style by Johan Bargum, one of Finland’s most renowned contemporary writers.

Hannele Mikaela Taivassalo's works span drama and prose, but always with a poetic touch, and In Transit is no exception.

Lena Frölander-Ulf's enchanting winter read is a thought-provoking exploration of confronting fears and preconceptions through encounters with whimsical forest folk and a homely troll.

An independent prequel to the well-received Maresi, Maria Turtschaninoff's Naondel tells the story of the First Sisters – founders of the Red Abbey.

Andersson's book is a call to arms against the sterile, anonymous, uniform and ubiquitous ‘grey boxes’ of Finnish modernism.