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Product Details
Price
$23.00  $21.39
Publisher
Two Lines Press
Publish Date
Pages
312
Dimensions
5.0 X 8.1 X 0.9 inches | 0.95 pounds
Language
English
Type
Hardcover
EAN/UPC
9781949641714

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About the Author
Pirkko Saisio (b. 1949) studied drama and completed her actor's training in 1975. Her debut novel The Course of Life (Elämänmeno, 1975) won the J. H. Erkko Award. Saisio has been nominated for the Finlandia Prize seven times, winning it in with The Red Book of Farewells (Punainen erokirja, 2003). She has, among other awards, received Aleksis Kivi Prize and State Literature Award. Apart from novels, she has written numerous plays and scripts for film and television and is a well-known theatre director.
Mia Spangenberg translates from Finnish, Swedish, and German into English. Her work has been published in Finland and the UK, and appeared in journals such as LitHub and Asymptote. She holds a Ph.D. in Scandinavian studies from the University of Washington, Seattle, where she resides with her family.
Reviews

An ABA Indie Next Pick for November


"Saisio beautifully captures the wonder and horror that can coexist in a child's imagination...Pirkko finds in literature the space to explore conflicts of class and gender ("Everything that exists in the world is waiting for me to capture it in books"). Readers will be grateful to share in Pirkko's discoveries."
--Publishers Weekly


Praise for Pirkko Saisio and The Red Book of Farewells


Winner of the Finlandia Prize
Winner of the Aleksis Kivi Prize

"In Pirkko's Helsinki, the personal and political are not collapsed but interlinked, and revolution is closely tied with sensuality. Idealistic young people rush, disguised in drab overcoats, to secret locations where coded knocks allow them inside to discuss the hot political topics of the day. And then, in those back rooms, private identities bloom... Long an object of study in Finland, Saisio's work is beginning to gain more global recognition now, cementing her place in the canon of autofiction that also includes the Nordic writers Karl Ove Knausgaard and Tove Ditlevsen."
--Niina Pollari, Los Angeles Review of Books

"A beautifully rendered portrait of a strikingly queer life--Saisio troubles any distinction we might try to draw between the personal and the political, the remembered and the invented."
--Morgan Thomas, author of Manywhere

"This Red Book of Farewells is also a book of welcoming: to life, to love, to death, to art, to revolution, to our ever-changing identities. It is hilarious and heartbreaking and like nothing I've ever read before."
--Jazmina Barrera, author of Linea Nigra