Eeva Kilpi Finland

Eeva Kilpi (b. 1928) is one of Finland’s most famous and best-loved writers. She spent her childhood in Karelia, the part of Finland ceded to the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War. She studied English, Aesthetics, Modern Literature and Art History at Helsinki University (graduating in 1953), then taught English before becoming a full-time writer in 1959. Her literary output has included poems, novels and essays, and her work has been translated into many languages, including Hebrew, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Hungarian, Polish and Greek, and all the main languages of Scandinavia. Her most recent work, Kuolinsiivous – a collection of poems, aphorisms, memories and observations drawn from diary entries over many years – was published by WSOY in 2012.

Eeva Kilpi has been Chair of Finnish PEN (1970–1975), and has received many prizes and honours, including the Pro Finlandia Medal of the Order of the Lion of Finland (1974), the State Literature Award (1968, 1974 and 1984), the Runeberg Prize (1990) and the Nils Ferlin Award (from Sweden, 2007). In recent years she has been a Nobel Literature Prize nominee.

(2014)