Author: Tero Liukkonen

Short cuts

Issue 1/2000 | Archives online, Authors, Interviews, Reviews

‘For me, writing is an irrational and intuitive process’, says the young writer Tuuve Aro (born 1973). ‘I do not decide or plan in advance what I want to say; the text carries me onward as I go’.

Tuuve Aro strikes one as cheerful and intelligent, a self-assured and resolute young woman. She relates to her new role as an author just as naturally as she describes the genesis of her short-story collection Harmia lämpöpatterista (‘Trouble from the radiator’, Gummerus, 1999). For Aro, writing has long been a tool to figure herself and the world, but she has never felt the compulsion to gather her writings into a book. But when a certain sort of text had accumulated sufficiently, it was time to send the manuscript to a publisher. More…

And yet, after decades

Issue 2/1997 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

If Mirkka Rekola had received the recognition she deserved in the 1960s, and not only gradually during the 1980s, the history of Finnish poetry would look different. She is among our central modernists.

Rekola has been trampled underfoot twice by the politics of the literary world. In the 1950s she unknowingly chose the wrong publisher, the conservative Werner Söderström, when the avant garde were on Otava’s list. In 1962, with the increasing politicisation of literature, the cult figure of the younger generation, Pentti Saarikoski, attacked Rekola, considering her an example of the poetry that was to be discarded. More…

Who’s looking

Issue 4/1995 | Archives online, Authors

During the 1990s, young Finnish poetry has been in search of a new grip on language: what is being written now is poetry of the ardent intellect.

lntellectually and consciously, Riina Katajavuori (born 1968) retreats from simple expression of emotion but, through the inner intensity of the poems, forces the reader to join her in the process of creating meaning.

In her first collection of poetry, Varkaan kirja (‘The book of the thief,1992), Katajavuori plays a sort of intertextual game. Through literary and other cultural references she seeks a polyphonic effect, but the integration of private mental images with a rough and associative textual fibre does not yet succeed completely. More…

Stories of solitude

Issue 3/1988 | Archives online, Authors

The short story has, discounting a few seasonal variations, always been a popular and greatly loved literary genre in Finland. Recently young writers, in particular, have lent new credence to the strengths and variety of the short story.

Sinikka Tirkkonen (born 1954) has published two highly original collections of short stories, Halla (‘Frost’, 1985) and Luvaton elämä (‘Forbidden life’, 1987). In them she has claimed her place as a writer and aroused great expectation. Her second book won the 1988 Runeberg Prize as well as a Government literature prize; she has also been awarded a one­-year literary grant. Sinikka Tirkkonen gave up a teaching job to become a writer. Now she does her solitary work in a little cottage in the village she was born in, 350 kilometres from the literary circles of the south. More…