Rosa Liksom

Biography

Rosa Liksom’s second book, “The Forgotten Quarter-Hour” (1986), was published on the day her exhibition opened at the Galerie Pelin. At the opening the writer appeared in military uniform, as did several of her lookalikes, and it proved impossible to recognise her or to interview her.

Her real name is Anni Ylävaara. She was born on 7 January 1958 in Ylitornio, in Finnish Lapland, on the border with Sweden. Her parents were farmers and reindeer herders. As a teenager she moved to Rovaniemi, and later to Helsinki. In her youth she lived in various European countries, in squats and communes.

She studied anthropology and social sciences in Helsinki and Copenhagen, then sociology at Moscow State University.

Her first stories appeared in the mid-1980s, when she was living in Denmark, in the free town of Christiania in Copenhagen. At the same time she began to paint and to make short films. The collection “One Night Stands” (1985) brought her recognition and the J. H. Erkko Award. Almost nothing was known about the writer then, and readers wondered where she had come from. It was followed by “The Forgotten Quarter-Hour” (1986), “Väliasema Gagarin” (“Gagarin Intermediate Station”, 1987), “Go Moskova go” (1988), in which Liksom’s texts were accompanied by drawings by Jukka Uotila, and “Tyhjän tien paratiisit” (“Paradises of the Empty Road”, 1989).

Her texts are made up of short stories, and critics say that she created the notion of “short prose” in Finnish literature. In the first two collections readers saw portraits of the destitute and the marginalised, and took them for documentary testimony about Finnish life. From “Paradises of the Empty Road” onward, through “BamaLama” (1993) and the novel “Kreisland” (1996), her manner changes: Liksom parodies her earlier themes and ways of speaking, and with them the northern landscape as an image of modern melancholy. This was not noticed at once: she was reproached for abandoning seriousness and literature as such. The critic Antti Majander thought that “Kreisland” deserved a nomination for the Finlandia Prize. Scholars treat the writer’s own persona as part of a single larger work, and her public role as a continuation of the parodic serial manner of her texts.

Alongside these came comics: “Roskaa” (“Trash”, 1991) and “Värityskirja” (“Colouring Book”, 1998). In the novel “Reitari” (2002) she wrote about the Lapland painter Reidar Särestöniemi, and in the collection “Maa” (“Earth”, 2006) she returned to short prose. For children she wrote books about Jepata Nasta, among them “Jepata Nasta’s Flight” and “Jepata Nasta at the North Pole” (illustrated by Charles Fréger).

In 2011 the novel “Hytti nro 6” (“Compartment No. 6”) won her the Finlandia Prize, the country’s main literary award. In 2013 it was shortlisted for the French Prix Médicis étranger, and in the same year Liksom received the Pro Finlandia medal. The film based on the novel, made in 2021, competed at the Cannes Film Festival and won the Grand Prix. The Russian translation of the book was presented in Moscow on 28 November 2015 at the non/fiction book fair.

Among her later novels are “Väliaikainen” (“Temporary”) and “Burka” (both 2014), “Everstinna” (“The Colonel’s Wife”, 2017), built on the figure of Annikki Kariniemi, and “Väylä” (“Fairway”, 2021). The book about Kariniemi caused a dispute: the scholar Outi Hytönen reproached the author in an essay for giving a distorted image of its heroine.

From April to August 2012 the St Petersburg branch of the Finnish Institute showed her paintings, her collection of Soviet children’s toys and works by her friend, the artist Jarmo Valtanen. Among her other honours are the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2016), the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize (2020) and the Aleksis Kivi Prize (2023).