Some books go far. Some have a vast marketing machine behind them. Others have an adoring aunt that’s always inviting them round for coffee and cake, digging around her own bookshelves for that particular edition that might just help, and wants ALL the cousins together round the table at least once a year so she can see how they are getting on. She might look somewhat distracted but she is making sure that the bossy ones don’t pull the little ones’ hair, and that the dessert doesn’t run out. She is listening. And if you ask her, she will have something very insightful to say.
Dear FILI, I hope you don’t mind being called an aunt (I’ve many niblings myself, but I’m not a mum). Because FILI is the aunt that gave the little pike a little push out of a lake in Lapland and across the oceans.
Juhani Karila’s Pienen hauen pyydystys (Siltala 2019) will soon be in a dozen languages now, and most translations are supported by FILI, the Finnish Literature Exchange. Reading that list reminds me of who gathers noisily round the table once a year (at the fellowship seminar for translators during the Helsinki Book Fair). Some of them would have translated this book anyway. It would have made it out there, because it’s wonderful, but it might not have swum so far, so fast, without a little push.
The little pike is out in English any day now. Lola Rogers’ translation, Summer Fishing in Lapland, is published by Pushkin Press in the UK July and swims acorss the pond to Restless Books in August. It’s an utterly delightful mix of fantasy and grim reality, northern nature and detective story, that’s sometimes devastating and often very funny. I’m so excited you can read it in English!
Translator, editor, writer, reader
found in translation 
What a fun post. The FILItaret, as they used to call themselves, are indeed our benevolent aunties.
Now your English translation is out I have to buy it for all the family 🙂