All prizes Finland
Kaunokirjallisuuden Finlandia-palkinto
Finland · Since 1984 · For books in Finnish or Swedish
Awarded each autumn by the Finnish Book Foundation (Suomen Kirjasäätiö) to a Finnish novel of the year, written in Finnish or Swedish; a board nominates three to six books and a single selector picks the winner.
The Finnish Book Foundation founded the prize in 1984. Until 1989 non-fiction competed with fiction, and until 1992 any work of fiction could win; since 1993 only novels are eligible. Since then a selection board has named three to six nominees each autumn, and one selector, often a public figure from outside literature, chooses the winner from them. The board grew from three to six members in 2024. Publishers submit the books, and Swedish-language Finnish novels compete alongside Finnish ones: Bo Carpelan, Kjell Westö and Ulla-Lena Lundberg have all won. The prize was first limited to Finnish citizens; the rule was dropped after a Slovak author writing in Finnish was nominated. Separate Finlandia prizes for non-fiction (since 1989) and for children's and youth books (since 1997) are awarded too. The prize is the best-known literary award in Finland and is worth 30,000 euros.
Finlandia 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Collectors”
Novel · 206 pages · Nature
AI-generated summary:At a campsite in Kainuu near the eastern border, run by a wildlife photographer, a librarian from Kostomuksha and a former border-guard dog, an archaeologist arrives to look for remains from the war.
Finlandia 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Pronouns”
Hanna Weselius · 53 when first published
Novel · 377 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:A passenger plane takes off for another continent after a chaotic departure from a burning world, with tarpaulins over some seats, a strange trolley, one tireless steward and no clear destination.
Finlandia 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Beacon Fires”
Jarkko Volanen · 54 when first published
Novel · 399 pages · Politics, Family
AI-generated summary:Reunited after years apart, an ex-convict and his dutiful civil-servant brother turn to a woman who works with victims of state persecution, while she and her partner fear their love and their son will be taken from them.
Finlandia 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Low-Budget War Film”
Marjo Niemi · 47 when first published
Novel · 244 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A narrator returns to a dwindling factory town of her childhood, where her parents are gone and her brother has vanished, yet someone or something keeps watch over her in the old house.
Finlandia 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Night Sitters”
Riko Saatsi · 47 when first published
Novel · 191 pages · Migration, Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:In 1950s Finland, a family of Karelian evacuees prepares a wake for their dying grandmother, while their sensitive son is seized by visions and they are made to feel ashamed of their language and faith.
Finlandia 2024 · Shortlist
Anna-Kaari Hakkarainen · 45 when first published
Novel · 670 pages
AI-generated summary:On an island, a writer and two women are caught up in Ingmar Bergman's films and characters who plot an escape, in a hybrid novel about power, desire and losing oneself in another person.
Finlandia 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Substitution Therapy”
Hanna-Riikka Kuisma · 46 when first published
Novel · 347 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Years after quitting drugs, a man learns something new about his younger sister, missing for decades, and the news threatens to pull him back into the addicts' world of his 1990s hometown.
Finlandia 2024 · Shortlist
Helmi Kekkonen · 42 when first published
Novel · 183 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Bored on the last week of summer at the family's island cottage, a young woman of twenty-two meets a too-familiar stranger on the shore rocks and secretly arranges to see him again.
Finlandia 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“How to Meet a Mother”
Kaj Korkea-aho · 41 when first published
Novel · 243 pages · Autofiction, Family
AI-generated summary:Together for eight years, Kaj and Niko in Helsinki want a child and set out to find a woman willing to share parenthood with them.
Finlandia 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Bark”
Tommi Kinnunen · 51 when first published
Novel · 204 pages · War, Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:Three siblings gather in a northern village at the hospital bed of their dying mother Laina, who has never spoken of what happened to her in the war.
Finlandia 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Sexton”
Novel · 282 pages
AI-generated summary:Turtola keeps a small country church and its graveyard, prays, and walks five-year-old Monika to kindergarten, while his vicar drinks, labours over a thesis and endures God's silence.
Finlandia 2023 · Shortlist
Elolliset
Iida Turpeinen · 36 when first published
Novel · 296 pages · Historical, Nature
AI-generated summary:In 1741 the naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller sails with Vitus Bering's expedition and finds a giant sea mammal; a century later a governor of Russian Alaska hunts for its skeleton.
Finlandia 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Nothing Really Disappears”
Laura Gustafsson · 40 when first published
Novel · 263 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:Worn out after years of night-time barn raids and campaigns for animals, a career activist nearing middle age no longer sees a point in living, as the meat and dairy industry only grows.
Finlandia 2023 · Shortlist
Miki Liukkonen · 34 when first published
Novel · 554 pages
AI-generated summary:Ren Dawn, who invents things for a living, can no longer come up with anything, and a chain of mishaps sends him to Cancún, hormone therapy and delirium until he seems to watch his life from outside.
Finlandia 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Anatomy of Hide-and-Seek”
Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen · 57 when first published
Novel · 575 pages · Coming of age, Speculative
AI-generated summary:M, a strange child who studies ordinary life like an agent from another planet, loses the gifted older brother who invented a Martian game of hide-and-seek, and blames himself.
Finlandia 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Cultured and Pleasant Person”
Eeva Turunen · 39 when first published
Novel · 439 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:After her beloved grandfather dies, an architect who inherited his profession must empty his house, choose an urn and plan a funeral, while her relationship and her job make their own demands.
Finlandia 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Human Twilight”
Heikki Kännö · 54 when first published
Novel · 1038 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:In a near future where humans have made their planet unlivable and their reign over nature is over, the old gods of Europe return and humankind fades into twilight.
Finlandia 2022 · Shortlist
Marja Kyllönen · 47 when first published
Novel · 349 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:While a couple waits for a child, a presence that was never given a share reaches toward mother, father, grandmother, a neighbour's girl and a brother, and each tries to fill the emptiness in their own way.
Finlandia 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Stalker Years”
Olli Jalonen · 68 when first published
Novel · 509 pages · Politics, Historical
AI-generated summary:In 1974 a Tampere university student is secretly recruited to inform on old school friends, their private lives and their politics, and the task slowly takes over his own life.
Finlandia 2022 · Shortlist
Sami Tissari · 51 when first published
Novel · 381 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:In an alternative history where a Soviet submarine rescued AI pioneer Frank Rosenblatt in 1971, his machine made the Soviet Union rule the world, until it shut down and civilization vanished.
Finlandia 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Mind of a Circus Lion”
Joel Elstelä · 60 when first published
Novel · 582 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:In Berlin in spring 1940 the Nazis take over an old travelling circus, and its weary director must lead his troupe of misfits on a tour across the Third Reich.
Finlandia 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Hearing”
Marjo Niemi · 43 when first published
Novel · 223 pages
AI-generated summary:An ordinary, comfortable middle-class narrator writes to a lover, a father, a creditor and a stranger, pleading and confessing in an effort to be seen and heard.
Finlandia 2021 · Shortlist
Matias Riikonen · 32 when first published
Novel · 307 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Boys spend their summers playing at an imaginary republic, with war drills, scheming senators and spying raids on enemy camps, in a game where a wooden sword can kill.
Finlandia 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Passion”
Pirkko Saisio · 72 when first published
Novel · 732 pages · Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:After Savonarola's execution in Florence, a princess is buried with a jewel whose painful secret she keeps; over the centuries the jewel passes from owner to owner across Europe, finally reaching Finland.
Finlandia 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Waterway”
Rosa Liksom · 63 when first published
Novel · 266 pages · War, Coming of age, Historical
AI-generated summary:In September 1944, as tens of thousands flee the destruction of the Lapland War, a village girl separated from her family drives her farm's cattle westward.
Finlandia 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Homestead”
Ann-Luise Bertell · 49 when first published
Novel · 379 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:After his father dies, ten-year-old Elof and his younger brother are left to the mercy of relatives in an Ostrobothnian village, and fear becomes his lifelong companion.
Finlandia 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Black Ice”
Anne Vuori-Kemilä · 62 when first published
Novel · 297 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Two misfits, a hearse driver and a fragile woman he once protected, are bound in a troubled relationship, until one of the boys who grew up in their yard finds two figures in a bedroom.
Finlandia 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Poet”
Heikki Kännö · 52 when first published
Novel · 568 pages · Historical, Speculative, Crime
AI-generated summary:In the freezing Lyon of 1888, police hunt a killer called the Poet while a badly beaten young man turns up at a touring theatre company's camp; years later Rudolf Steiner meets a strange poet at the Nietzsche archive.
Finlandia 2020 · Shortlist
Novel · 265 pages
AI-generated summary:A novelist pictures the final years of her sister, also a writer, killed in a house fire: a gifted woman torn between her craft and the hardships of daily life, between wanting to go on and sensing her end.
Finlandia 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Did Not Say She Regretted It”
Tommi Kinnunen · 47 when first published
Novel · 351 pages · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:In early summer 1945, five Finnish women who had followed the German army leave a prison camp in Norway and set out on foot for home across burned-out Lapland.
Finlandia 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Apartment Block”
Hanna-Riikka Kuisma · 41 when first published
Novel · 332 pages
AI-generated summary:Several voices tell of life among the poor and the left-behind in a suburb of concrete apartment blocks, where lost men and tough, independent women get by in everyday hardship.
Finlandia 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The First Lady”
Johanna Venho · 48 when first published
Novel · 261 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:In the summer of 1966, Sylvi Kekkonen, wife of the Finnish president, withdraws to her cottage after the death of a close friend, a writer, and takes stock of a life spent in her husband’s shadow.
Finlandia 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Firewing”
JP Koskinen · 51 when first published
Novel · 351 pages · Historical, Migration
AI-generated summary:During the Great Depression, a Finnish-American family hears of a workers’ paradise being built in Soviet Karelia, leaves everything behind and crosses the Atlantic, their son Kaarle dreaming of freedom and of flying.
Finlandia 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“If It Looks That Way”
Mikko Rimminen · 44 when first published
Novel · 234 pages
AI-generated summary:Mr Lyysälä, a reclusive older gentleman in a Helsinki apartment block, keeps his neighbours at a polite distance. When a young boy who had grown fond of him suddenly vanishes, the building is sure who is to blame.
Finlandia 2019 · Shortlist
Vem dödade bambi?
Monika Fagerholm · 58 when first published
Novel · 176 pages · Crime, Family
AI-generated summary:In a fashionable suburb of Helsinki, four boys from well-off families gang-rape a schoolmate at a party. Their mothers try to bury it, until a childhood friend announces he will make a film about the crime.
Finlandia 2018 · Shortlist
J. Pekka Mäkelä · 56 when first published
Novel · 549 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:In the 1930s, in the landscapes of China’s Hunan province, missionaries spread Christianity and literacy, and a Swiss man, Johann Caspar Wolff, records their lives as war breaks out with Japan.
Finlandia 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“On Both Sides of the Rapids”
Jari Järvelä · 52 when first published
Novel · 200 pages · Family, War, Historical
AI-generated summary:In the summer of 1977 a seven-year-old boy spends two days with his two grandmothers, who live on opposite sides of the rapids and of the 1918 civil war: one family fought with the Reds, the other with the Whites.
Finlandia 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Rose Is Gone”
Katja Kettu · 40 when first published
Novel · 284 pages · Family, Love
AI-generated summary:Ettu, a Finn, wakes on a reservation in Minnesota to find that his beloved Rose, an Ojibwe woman, is gone, and at the police station learns that he has lost thirty-five years.
Finlandia 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Where the Music Began”
Lars Sund · 65 when first published
Novel · 488 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:After an international success with an opera, a Finnish composer’s story is traced back to his youth in a pulp-mill port town in Ostrobothnia in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, to a soundtrack of rock music.
Finlandia 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Sin Bearers”
Pauliina Rauhala · 41 when first published
Novel · 367 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:In a riverside village in northern Ostrobothnia in the late 1970s, a devout community awaits the Second Coming, while one family’s members, from a doubting grandmother to a ten-year-old boy, wrestle with faith and love.
Finlandia 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Whale Called Goliath”
Cristina Sandu · 28 when first published
Novel · 265 pages · Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:Alba, thirty, born in Helsinki to a Finnish mother and a Romanian father, travels to her grandfather’s funeral in Romania and begins to dig into her family’s past under the dictatorship.
Finlandia 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Ice Cover”
Hanna Hauru · 39 when first published
Novella · 116 pages · War, Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Around 1950 in a northern Finnish parish, a girl whose father fell at the front grows up under a stepfather scarred by the war, who turns the family’s cottage into a hell on earth.
Finlandia 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Continuation War Extra”
Jaakko Yli-Juonikas · 41 when first published
Novel · 668 pages · Satire, Politics
AI-generated summary:An experimental political satire, more than 600 pages long, built around a tangle of events surrounding the Finns Party, in which play with the book’s structure matters more than the plot.
Finlandia 2017 · Shortlist
Miki Liukkonen · 28 when first published
Novel · 858 pages
AI-generated summary:A swimming team trains for the Olympics, a company designs artistically ambitious water slides, and a man escapes his neuroses by locking himself in a garden shed, in a sprawling novel of everyday life today.
Finlandia 2017 · Shortlist
Tommi Liimatta · 41 when first published
Novel · 271 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Three parallel stories from the self-sufficient Finnish north are told by three generations: a crippled war hero, an emigrant to Sweden and people who came of age in the 1990s.
Finlandia 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“European Dreams”
Emma Puikkonen · 42 when first published
Novel · 179 pages
AI-generated summary:A Polish truck driver picks up a young hitchhiker and shares an unforgettable vision with him on the road. Linked episodes follow ordinary people through the upheavals of recent European history.
Finlandia 2016 · Shortlist
Peter Sandström · 53 when first published
Novel · 224 pages · Family, Love
AI-generated summary:Peter, a writer in his fifties, sits at home in Turku waiting for his wife, a successful academic who is pregnant and nearly always away, while he looks back on the summer of 1988 and his parents’ marriage.
Finlandia 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“We No Longer Believe in Evil”
Riku Korhonen · 44 when first published
Novel · 392 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A paintball entrepreneur living by the sea with his wife and two daughters finds his life too ordinary, and with an old friend plots to abduct his own wife, the way Zeus once carried off Europa.
Finlandia 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Summer of the Tanks”
Sirpa Kähkönen · 52 when first published
Novel · 412 pages · Historical, Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:In August 1968 an architect returns to his changing hometown of Kuopio and realises he has been lied to for years about what happened in the spring of 1945.
Finlandia 2016 · Shortlist
Tommi Kinnunen · 43 when first published
Novel · 364 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:At nine, Helena is taken from her remote village and sent alone to a school for the blind in 1950s Helsinki. Forty years later her nephew Tuomas moves south to university and comes to know his aunt anew.
Finlandia 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Breathing Space”
Kari Hotakainen · 58 when first published
Novel · 199 pages · Crime, Love
AI-generated summary:A detective superintendent joins a mixed choir to take his mind off work, but two fellow singers, a church verger and a hairdresser, are bound together by money troubles, fading love and dark secrets.
Finlandia 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Souls”
Markku Pääskynen · 42 when first published
Novel · 254 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:One early-summer morning a girl named Maija fails to turn up at school in a small town on Lake Saimaa. Her mother waits by the phone while her father searches the town.
Finlandia 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Enthusiast”
Panu Rajala · 70 when first published
Novel · 419 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:The life of I. K. Inha, the Finnish photographer, explorer, writer, translator and inventor who stayed in the shadow of the golden-age artists of his time.
Finlandia 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Dearest Time”
Pertti Lassila · 66 when first published
Novel · 147 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:A mother, her young son Kimmo and his grandfather spend a summer at a villa by a sea bay. The boy lives each day as if time did not exist, while the adults carry the weight of the wars just ended.
Finlandia 2015 · Shortlist
Taivaalta tippuvat asiat
Selja Ahava · 41 when first published
Novel · 240 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A young girl, Saara, loses her mother to a block of ice that falls from the sky. She and her grieving father move in with her aunt at a manor house, where life goes on in strange ways.
Finlandia 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Goldbreast”
Anni Kytömäki · 34 when first published
Novel · 644 pages · Historical, Nature, Family
AI-generated summary:Spring 1917: the son of a rich Helsinki forest owner meets a working girl from the backwoods. As others take sides before the civil war, he leaves for the northern wilderness to guard the forests.
Finlandia 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Two Innocent Days”
Heidi Jaatinen · 46 when first published
Novel · 490 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Sisse, her partner Ake and her daughter Hertta enjoy two carefree, sober days at a borrowed summer cottage. For the 300 days that follow, mother and daughter are kept apart behind locked doors.
Finlandia 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Men and People”
Olli Jalonen · 60 when first published
Novel · 509 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Seventeen and in his first summer job at a sheet-metal workshop, a young man picks up the rough rules of the older workmen, while his nights bring first encounters with drink, love and sex.
Finlandia 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Granite Man”
Sirpa Kähkönen · 50 when first published
Novel · 334 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:In 1922 a young Finnish couple, Klara and Ilja, shed everything, even their names, and set off on skis for Petrograd, six hundred kilometres away, eager to help create a fair and free society.
Finlandia 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Where Four Roads Cross”
Tommi Kinnunen · 41 when first published
Novel · 334 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:In northern Finland, the young village midwife Maria earns respect by seeing women through hard births, while her daughter Lahja, born outside marriage, wants all the things her mother rejected.
Finlandia 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Herod”
Asko Sahlberg · 49 when first published
Novel · 680 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:At the dawn of the Christian era, Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee and Perea, senses his reign and soon his life under threat, and looks back on power struggles, war, love and a crime he can never atone for.
Finlandia 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Terminal”
Hannu Raittila · 57 when first published
Novel · 453 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:In the early 1990s two schoolgirls, Paula and Sara, make Helsinki-Vantaa airport their hangout, a habit that grows into a global subculture of young women hopping from one airport to the next.
Finlandia 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“My Friend Rasputin”
JP Koskinen · 45 when first published
Novel · 355 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Orphaned Vasili becomes the apprentice of a wild-eyed pilgrim bound for Jerusalem: Grigori Rasputin, the mystic who scandalises the aristocracy of St Petersburg but has the imperial family's complete trust.
Finlandia 2013 · Shortlist
Hägring 38
Kjell Westö · 52 when first published
Novel · 341 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:Helsinki, 1938: the divorced lawyer Claes Thune takes on a capable, guarded clerk, Matilda Wiik. Then one evening, among his old friends of the Wednesday Club, she recognises a man from her past.
Also: Augustpriset 2013 shortlist
Finlandia 2013 · Shortlist
Leena Krohn · 66 when first published
Novel · 163 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:Nobody at the closed Hotel Sapiens is quite well, and the world outside seems finished; its guests, among them a blind eye doctor and the Higgs boson, live under the watch of machines wiser than their makers.
Finlandia 2012 · Shortlist
Nälkävuosi
Aki Ollikainen · 39 when first published
Novel · 144 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:During the great famine, little Mataleena struggles through a snowstorm behind her mother as the family begs its way across a starving land, dreaming of golden St Petersburg.
Finlandia 2012 · Shortlist
Heidi Köngäs · 58 when first published
Novel · 333 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:Christmas 1943: Hitler's armaments minister Albert Speer sets out for Finnish Lapland, heading for the Arctic coast in the polar night, and in Rovaniemi a young Finnish liaison officer joins his party as interpreter.
Finlandia 2012 · Shortlist
Juha Seppälä · 56 when first published
Novel · 278 pages
AI-generated summary:Mysterious Mr. Smith slips freely between eras and places, past and present, and sets out to solve the puzzle of his grandfather, Herr Schmidt, and a manuscript that vanished.
Finlandia 2012 · Shortlist
Pirjo Hassinen · 55 when first published
Novel · 318 pages · Politics, Family
AI-generated summary:Neighbours Pirjo, fifty, and Perttu, a bouncer twenty years younger, share easy evenings over wine, until Perttu falls in with Popula, a right-wing populist party.
Finlandia 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Landing”
Riikka Ala-Harja · 45 when first published
Novel · 209 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:In Normandy, where the Allies once came ashore, 41-year-old Julie lives through her worst year: first her husband betrays her, then her daughter Emma, eight, is diagnosed with cancer.
Finlandia 2011 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Skull Drum”
Eeva-Kaarina Aronen · 63 when first published
Novel · 389 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:In a derelict Helsinki warehouse, a reclusive old man screens the film he has spent decades on: one November day in 1935 in the Kaivopuisto house where Marshal Mannerheim lived upstairs.
Finlandia 2011 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“For the Fatherland”
Jenni Linturi · 32 when first published
Novel · 232 pages · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:Antti Vallas, 79, falls from a roof. When he comes to, his wartime years as a Finnish volunteer in Germany's Waffen-SS start forcing their way into the present.
Finlandia 2011 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“William N.: A Diary”
Kristina Carlson · 62 when first published
Novel · 159 pages
AI-generated summary:Paris in the 1890s: William N., an ageing Finnish botanist whose stubborn ideas have left him outside mainstream science, lives a solitary life examining lichens and trying to complete his life's work.
Finlandia 2011 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“I, Catherine”
Laila Hirvisaari · 73 when first published
Novel · 607 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Laid up after an accident and perhaps near death, Catherine the Great looks back on the road that took a German princess, married off as a girl, to the Russian throne.
Finlandia 2011 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Whore Tale”
Laura Gustafsson · 28 when first published
Novel · 294 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:Gods land in Helsinki by accident while two young women, Milla and Kalla, go into sex work; around them spins a raw, mythic tale of bodies, violence, money and the hidden history of women.
Finlandia 2010 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“27, or Death Makes the Artist”
Alexandra Salmela · 30 when first published
Novel · 311 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:On her 27th birthday Angie panics: like her rock idols, she wants to become a famous artist and die young within the year. Stuck in Prague, she runs off to the Finnish countryside and moves in beside an eco-minded family.
Also: Anasoft litera 2012 finalist
Finlandia 2010 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Fly Tamer”
Erik Wahlström · 65 when first published
Novel · 302 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:The aged Johan Ludvig Runeberg, Finland's national poet, seen without his halo: his life is told in reverse, back to his first years, while the friends, rivals and mistresses around him judge what he got right and wrong.
Finlandia 2010 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Vanishing Point”
Joel Haahtela · 38 when first published
Novel · 160 pages
AI-generated summary:A Helsinki psychiatrist comes to the aid of a Frenchwoman caught in a gust of wind. She is in Finland to trace her vanished ex-husband, with a single clue: a novel by the late writer Raija Siekkinen.
Finlandia 2010 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Candy Day”
Markus Nummi · 51 when first published
Novel · 383 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:When a young writer covers a small boy's sweets at the till, the neglected child, Tomi, attaches himself to him and asks for help saving a princess held captive nearby.
Finlandia 2010 · Shortlist
Totta
Riikka Pulkkinen · 30 when first published
Novel · 368 pages · Family, Love
AI-generated summary:Dying of cancer and done with lies, Elsa tells her granddaughter Anna about Eeva, the young nanny who, back in the 1960s, almost broke up Elsa's marriage to Martti.
Finlandia 2009 · Shortlist
Ihmisen osa
Kari Hotakainen · 52 when first published
Novel · 253 pages · Family, Satire
AI-generated summary:Salme Malmikunnas, a retired yarn seller who never reads novels, meets an author at a book fair who has no ideas left. He offers her 7,000 euros for her life story, and she accepts, needing the money.
Finlandia 2009 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Lost”
Marko Kilpi · 40 when first published
Novel · 396 pages · Crime · Olli Repo, book 2
AI-generated summary:Olli Repo, an adman turned policeman who now trains cadets, is privately adrift and unsure of his own morality. Minor celebrities start vanishing and threats appear on online forums.
Finlandia 2009 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“No Longing, No Sorrow”
Merete Mazzarella · 64 when first published
Novel · 198 pages · Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:One winter day in 1897, at his home in Sipoo, the aged writer Zacharias Topelius lets ordinary household events stir memories of youth, his late wife and his three daughters.
Finlandia 2009 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The French Friend”
Tommi Melender · 41 when first published
Novel · 237 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Joel Raento, a Finnish playwright turned well-paid speaker, retreats after a personal crisis to a provincial town in France to read Flaubert, and befriends Marcel, an ex-teacher who drives for a local gang.
Finlandia 2009 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Backwoods”
Novel · 320 pages
AI-generated summary:In a small town surrounded by fields and woods, lonely people pass each other daily without meeting: a factory boss who knows the plant will close, an immigrant father, an eccentric said to have drowned.
Finlandia 2008 · Shortlist
Arne Nevanlinna · 83 when first published
Novel · 288 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:Marie Myhrborgh, as old as the twentieth century, can barely turn over in her nursing-home bed. A Helsinki surgeon's widow from Strasbourg, she lets her memories range freely over a long life.
Finlandia 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Devil's Fork”
Juha Seppälä · 52 when first published
Novel · 267 pages
AI-generated summary:A long-unemployed factory worker, a teardrop of God inked on his neck, despises the modern world. Around him a web producer, a sociologist, a financial adviser and a filmmaker go about their lonely lives.
Finlandia 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Cosmonaut”
Katri Lipson · 43 when first published
Novel · 199 pages
AI-generated summary:In 1980s Murmansk, a bullied music teacher remembers the timid boy Seryozha, who adored her and dreamed with his friend Sasha of flying to space. Years later, a documentary makes the boy famous, but no one can find him.
Finlandia 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Fourteen Knots to Greenwich”
Olli Jalonen · 54 when first published
Novel · 381 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Petr Järvi, a Finnish historian of inland waters, is invited by an old Cambridge friend to circle the earth along longitude zero within a year, travelling as people did in Halley's eighteenth century.
Finlandia 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Immoderation”
Pirkko Saisio · 59 when first published
Novel · 583 pages · Satire, Politics
AI-generated summary:In 1990s Helsinki, a grey, insecure journalist has a near-religious vision at Hakaniemi market: a tall, blond, dazzlingly charismatic man. He drops everything to follow him into television and then into politics.
Finlandia 2007 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“It Has Been Cold in Madrid”
Agneta Ara · 62 when first published
Novel · 330 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Bella, a psychiatrist, looks back on her once-happy childhood with her brother André, until it emerged that their father was André's harsh stepfather. Her work with other people's memories makes her question her own.
Finlandia 2007 · Shortlist
Jari Järvelä · 41 when first published
Novel · 182 pages · Love, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Vante is seventeen, Julia thirteen, and everyone around them says they are too young to be in love. When their parents and the authorities step in, the pair run away together across wintry Finland.
Finlandia 2007 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Towards”
Juha Itkonen · 32 when first published
Novel · 428 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A year after his daughter Julia left home with only a note, a Finnish cabinet minister glimpses her in a TV report from tsunami-hit Khao Lak and secretly flies to Thailand to bring her back.
Finlandia 2007 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Scissors”
Laura Lindstedt · 31 when first published
Novel · 240 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A successful single woman flies to China to adopt a small girl after years of preparation. Back home, the child meets her with a silent stare, and the love she was so sure of fails to come.
Finlandia 2007 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Sheet Wings”
Sirpa Kähkönen · 43 when first published
Novel · 398 pages · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:Kuopio, 1 July 1941, the only day the town is bombed in the Continuation War. On a sweltering morning a dancer arrives with her small daughter, a foster boy plans to run away, and the townspeople wait for news of their men.
Finlandia 2006 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Careless”
Kari Hotakainen · 49 when first published
Novel · 267 pages · Love, Crime
AI-generated summary:Leila Korhonen runs a one-woman firm in Helsinki that sells lonely men tenderness and closeness, but not sex. When a regular client goes missing, she is questioned by Antero Mokka, a detective who has long gone without a woman's touch.
Finlandia 2006 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Day of Wrath”
Markku Pääskynen · 33 when first published
Novel · 117 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Eliisa, a depressed young mother near Porvoo, knows that her family is sunk in debt and that the bailiff has written, but she cannot bring herself to tell Asko, her hard-working husband.
Finlandia 2006 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Uncle's Lessons”
Petri Tamminen · 40 when first published
Novel · 205 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Jussi, a gloomy academic whose thesis goes nowhere, feels life passing him by. From boyhood to forty he turns for guidance to his mother's brother, a self-assured, hard-drinking charmer barely ten years his senior.
Finlandia 2006 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Around the Square in Skoghall”
Robert Åsbacka · 45 when first published
Novel · 187 pages
AI-generated summary:Since his divorce, Conny Erlandsson has lost interest in everything, including the grill kiosk he runs on the square of Skoghall, a fading mill town in Värmland. A summer art festival is about to bring the wider world to town.
Finlandia 2006 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Icon”
Taina Sampakoski · 49 when first published
Novel · 236 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:In a town in eastern Finland, Nikolai falls in love with Sonja, a painter of icons from Russia, and finds her faith taking hold of him, while her own feelings form as slowly as the icon on her easel.
Finlandia 2005 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Those Who Came from Across the Seas”
Anneli Toijala · 75 when first published
Novel · 479 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:Fleeing famine and reprisals after Finland's Civil War of 1918, the Matero siblings join a Finnish legion raised by the Allies at Murmansk, where their sister Elsa Mari opens a café.
Finlandia 2005 · Shortlist
Että hän muistaisi saman
Elina Hirvonen · 30 when first published
Novel · 180 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Helsinki, spring 2003. Instead of a quiet day of reading, Anna must go and see her mentally ill brother on a psychiatric ward, and on the way she relives her family's history and her American boyfriend's.
Finlandia 2005 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Powerlessness”
Pirkko Saisio · 56 when first published
Novel · 491 pages · Family, Love
AI-generated summary:Jaakko, a pastor, has been a faithful husband to Harriet for over three decades. One Midsummer their son's young friend Jokke turns up uninvited at the family's summer cottage.
Finlandia 2005 · Shortlist
Sarasvatin hiekkaa
Risto Isomäki · 44 when first published
Novel · 345 pages · Speculative, Nature
AI-generated summary:Scientists study a drowned city off India's west coast while others, in Finland and on the Greenland ice cap, try to understand and halt the melting of the polar ice.
Finlandia 2005 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Union”
Tuomas Kyrö · 31 when first published
Novel · 356 pages · Family, War
AI-generated summary:A tight-lipped young man and a woman who expects more of life marry one summer, as people do. His sister falls for Adolf Hitler, and a war breaks out that will shape the rest of their lives.
Finlandia 2004 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Oak Grove”
Asko Sahlberg · 40 when first published
Novel · 388 pages · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:In 1918 the servants have left a village manor, leaving only its weary old master Martin, when the disreputable Emma moves in to run it and the Red commander Aarne arrives with his men.
Finlandia 2004 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Dancing Priest”
Erik Wahlström · 59 when first published
Novel · 473 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:A freely told life of Uno Cygnaeus, later hailed as the father of Finland's elementary schools, which starts from a hushed-up fact: as a young priest he had a son with his housekeeper.
Finlandia 2004 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Mole”
Jari Tervo · 45 when first published
Novel · 543 pages · Politics, Crime, Historical
AI-generated summary:In 1978 Jura Karhu, a gifted young Security Police detective and black sheep of a large communist family, is ordered to expose a Soviet mole at the very top of the Finnish state.
Finlandia 2004 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Six-Pack Novel”
Mikko Rimminen · 29 when first published
Novel · 330 pages
AI-generated summary:On a hot summer day in Helsinki's Kallio district, three idle friends, Marsalkka, Lihi and Henninen, drift between kiosk, terrace and park after a heavy night, in search of a missing die.
Finlandia 2004 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The King's Park”
Pirjo Hassinen · 47 when first published
Novel · 380 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Ari, a businessman in his forties paralysed in an accident, lives in a luxury care home beside a park; when he sees that his wife has fallen in love, he starts arranging other people's lives.
Finlandia 2003 · Shortlist
Joel Haahtela · 31 when first published
Novella · 126 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A lonely man on a park bench builds his days around a young woman who crosses the park to the university each morning, and becomes obsessed with her once he learns her name, Elena.
Finlandia 2003 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Latter-Day Saints”
Juha Itkonen · 28 when first published
Novel · 295 pages · Coming of age, Love
AI-generated summary:David, a young Mormon from Salt Lake City whose whole family died in a plane crash, is sent with a rigid companion to preach in a quiet small town in southern Finland.
Finlandia 2003 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Youth Worker from Nokia”
Juha Ruusuvuori · 46 when first published
Novel · 260 pages · Satire, Speculative
AI-generated summary:A successful single father who heads an emotions team at Nokia wakes one night in his Berlin flat to find a woman's severed head rolling on the living-room floor.
Finlandia 2003 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Erik's Book”
Lars Sund · 50 when first published
Novel · 541 pages · Historical, War · Siklax trilogy, book 3
AI-generated summary:The Second World War and the Cold War shadow three people from the fictional Ostrobothnian village of Siklax: Erik, forced to leave Finland, who becomes a US soldier and CIA man.
Finlandia 2003 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Command”
Leena Lander · 48 when first published
Novel · 336 pages · War, Historical, Love
AI-generated summary:In April 1918, in a seaside village of civil-war Finland, a Red prisoner and the Jäger escorting her are brought to a field court after eight days missing on a remote island.
Finlandia 2002 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Pomegranate”
Anu Kaipainen · 69 when first published
Novel · 469 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A 68-year-old writer sends her reclusive gay son, past thirty, on a trip to Rome and uses the respite to revisit his childhood, asking whether she was too dominant a mother.
Finlandia 2002 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Long-Mouthed Kin”
Harri Tapper · 73 when first published
Novel · 330 pages · Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:Three families, the Köhlströms, the Björnwiks and the Tappers, move from Ostrobothnia to Saarijärvi, and over three hundred years of Finnish history their fortunes become tightly entwined.
Finlandia 2002 · Shortlist
Lang
Kjell Westö · 41 when first published
Novel · 180 pages · Love, Crime
AI-generated summary:Christian Lang, a novelist whom most of Helsinki knows as a television talk-show host, falls into a consuming affair; a narrator who heard his account pieces together what came of it.
Finlandia 2002 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Christmas Wife”
Pirjo Hassinen · 45 when first published
Novel · 333 pages · Family, Crime
AI-generated summary:In 2002 the police reopen the case of Rebekka, who vanished more than twenty years earlier, when her thirteen-year-old daughter Raakel was found wandering alone at an airport.
Finlandia 2002 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Without Great Sorrows”
Reko Lundán · 33 when first published
Novel · 354 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Over many years the Rinne family comes apart: Hanna and Rippa's marriage fades until they part, and their children Aki and Liisa grow up lonely in their father's care on an army base.
Finlandia 2001 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Lost”
Asko Sahlberg · 37 when first published
Novel · 328 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:On the run after a crime, a man picks up a car and a woman in a small coastal town, until shady jobs force him into hiding in the remote back country of southern Finland.
Finlandia 2001 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Pier on Its Way to the Sea”
Daniel Katz · 63 when first published
Novel · 443 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Henry Loimu, a schoolteacher, falls for Mavra, the young Bosnian wife of a blind colonel. The lovers keep their affair from her husband, but the deception comes at a price.
Finlandia 2001 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Your Love Is Boundless”
Maria Peura · 31 when first published
Novel · 224 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Six-year-old Saara is sent to her grandparents for the summer because her parents cannot care for her, and there the grandfather she believes is the one adult who loves her abuses her.
Finlandia 2001 · Shortlist
Sakari Issakainen · 63 when first published
Novel · 338 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Old friends meet again in Helsinki, and the reunion brings their past back to life, above all Espalmador, the island of their youthful dreams, which has kept its pull on them over the years.
Finlandia 2001 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Marzipan Soldier”
Ulla-Lena Lundberg · 54 when first published
Novel · 429 pages · War, Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:Through the Winter War and the Continuation War, a Swedish-speaking teacher's family near Helsinki sends two of its three sons to the front, while the eldest, Petter, carries weighty duties at home.
Finlandia 2000 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Dragon Bath”
Eeva Tikka · 61 when first published
Novel · 239 pages
AI-generated summary:Two women with a conflicted friendship, strong-willed Karin and sensitive Anja, take each other's measure while their memories of a childhood summer they shared refuse to match.
Finlandia 2000 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Farewell to the Family Saga”
Jusa Peltoniemi · 27 when first published
Novel · 307 pages · Family, Satire
AI-generated summary:A ragged comic chronicle of an Ostrobothnian family around Kokkola, whose generations trade, botch their love lives, find religion and curse their way through Finland's history.
Finlandia 2000 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Peril of Being a Skrake”
Kjell Westö · 39 when first published
Novel · 373 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:In Helsinki's Olympic summer of 1952, young Werner Skrake crashes a Coca-Cola truck on its launch day, a mishap that follows him and his son Wiktor for decades.
Finlandia 2000 · Shortlist
Vastavalo
Pirkko Saisio · 51 when first published
Novel · 278 pages · Autofiction, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:A writer revisits her school years and the many roles of her later life, asking how a person builds a self, in a fragmentary continuation of an autobiographical story.
Finlandia 2000 · Shortlist
Sami Parkkinen · 38 when first published
Novel · 182 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Since childhood Teo has found real contentment only in helping others, so constantly that most people find him a nuisance; his sister Arja is the one person who still listens to him.