Books from Finland - A literary journal of writing from and about Finland.

About the author

• One of the classics of the 20th-century Finnish literature, Frans Emil Sillanpää (1888–1964), published seven novels and more than a dozen of collections of short stories from 1916 onwards. He had started out as a medical student, and his literary career was based on a nature-philosophical and biological view of life as well as on cultural liberalism. In his novel Hurskas kurjuus (English translation, Meek Heritage, 1919) Sillanpää focused on the human tragedies of the defeated ‘Red’ side of the bloody civil war of 1918. The story of a young woman, Nuorena nukkunut (translated into English both as Fallen Asleep While Young and The Maid Silja), was translated into English in 1933. Sillanpää was awarded the Nobel Prize of literature in 1939, ‘for his deep understanding of his country's peasantry and the exquisite art with which he has portrayed their way of life and their relationship with Nature.’ His competitors among those who were being considered for the prize by the members of the Nobel Committee were Hermann Hesse and the Dutch writer Johan Huizinga.