Welcome to Modern Finnish Writers!
The database includes the authors’ personal details and introduces their work. The sources selected for further reading are mainly web-based, but there are references to other documents as well. Some texts on these web pages have been especially written for the database by the authors. The English pages are not identical to the Finnish and Swedish ones, as they mainly focus on authors whose work has been translated into English.
We hope you enjoy your visit!
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This section is only in Finnish!
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The art-nouveau building stands like a castle on a street corner in Helsinki. Quite literally, it had been wrapped up for months, tidily draped in opaque green plastic. The huge house was having a complete renovation.
At first, Anna had thought it would just have a fresh coat of paint, or new rendering perhaps. But that proved only the simplest, if most visible, part of the revamp.
Indeed, the building did get a new colour. Rendering that had become grey and chipped over decades was transformed to its original art-nouveau green, which beautifully enhanced the roundness of the corner bay-windows and the tower high above with its tapering roof.
Before the house peeled off its plastic clothing, however, really big changes occurred; so big that at some point Anna imagined only the outer walls would remain. They'll do the same with this one as with my other old friend before, she had thought with great annoyance, just leave the outer shell and fill it with offices.
In fact, nothing happened to the old flats, but elevators were installed and the cavernous attic was turned into more accommodation. A huge skip obstructed the street for many months, consuming incredible amounts of waste and junk through a pipeline from the attic. The skip was a real nuisance in the busy and narrow street, plugging it, annoying people in their cars - and driving Anna mad.
Anna had passed the house countless times, ever since she was a little girl off by bus to see a film or attend ballet classes, and it always fascinated her. In all its massiveness it had seemed gloomy and mysterious, as if it had stood there since time immemorial and would remain to the end of the world. At street level, businesses in the building included the Snow White laundry, which compounded the magic. Contrary to the plot of the fairy-tale, Anna had always imagined that the wicked stepmother held Snow White prisoner in the tower. Other business premises had seen tenants come and go over the years, lately at an alarming rate, but Snow White still laundered where she always had, with her old hedgehog puppets in the window.
A few years ago Anna had acquired her own little flat a couple of blocks away and she was very happy there - until the day when she stood watching the plastic wrapping come off the old green beauty at her rebirth. Genuinely envious, she decided she would live in that house one day, high up in an attic flat, with views of roofs and the harbour, islands nearby and, on a clear day, maybe all the way across the Finnish Gulf to Estonia. Like the flats themselves, the prices were sky-high, but nobody would stop her dreaming.
Sometimes, instead of walking past, Anna would pop in for a glance at the inner courtyard, which had been renewed previously. The ground was paved with some kind of mosaic, plants and shrubs thrived in big containers and in the centre there was even a fountain. Anna was not quite convinced that the fountain was very stylish. On warm summer evenings the courtyard felt very continental, but rarely did anyone seem to spend time in the seating area that looked so inviting.
Queen of the Block (Korttelin kuningatar, 1995)
Translated by Britt & Philip Gaut
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