FILI Spotlight

I’m not sure when FILI—the organization in charge of promoting Finnish literature abroad—redesigned its website, but the results are pretty impressive and definitely worth checking out.

I really like the Spotlight feature, which highlights a few Finnish authors, providing short overviews, excerpts in English, and information about foreign rights. Seems to be a relatively new feature—the archive contains info on only 13 authors and two batches of “picture books”—but hopefully this will be updated on a regular basis.

Some of these materials come from Books from Finland, the quarterly publication consisting of overview articles, essays on particular authors, reviews of new Finnish books, and excerpts. I’m a big fan of these “books from” publications (especially the one from Estonia, and the Vilnius Review), but I am disappointed that most of the contents aren’t available online—instead, interested readers have to subscribe for €28 for four issues. Which is a bit pricey here in the States thanks to the crap economic situation and the exchange rate, but not too terrible, I guess. Although I’d be more willing to pay if that meant I could access the full contents of all the past issues . . .

Finally, there’s a Finnish Literature in Translation database that’s fun to play with. According to this database there were 14 adult works published in English translation in the U.S. since 2000, and only one scheduled for 2008—The Parson’s Widow> by Marja-Liisa Vartio.