In today’s episode of The Nordic Reader, we chat to author Petra Rautiainen about her debut novel, Land of Snow and Ashes. The novel is translated by David Hackston.
Published in 2020, Land of Snow and Ashes won the Savonia Prize, and was nominated for the Helsingin Sanomat Literature prize and the Lapland Literature Prize.
The story unfolds in a dual timeline, in the years during and shortly after World War 2. In 1944, Väinö Remes arrives at a Nazi prison camp in Northern Finland. Set to work as a translator, Remes quickly gets swept up in the brutality of the camp, and the strange events that occur in the middle of the night. Some years later, in 1947, photographer and journalist Inkari Lindqvist arrives in Enontekiö, in Lapland. She is searching for her husband, who disappeared during the war. Northern Finland has been decimated by the German’s scorched earth policy, and the community is slowly starting to rebuild. But the new national Finnish identity clashes with Sami life and culture, and as Inkari starts her investigation, she exposes a great deal more than she was initially expecting...
This novel pulls back the curtain on a hidden and seldom talked about period of Finnish history. It is one of the first novels to talk about the Nazi camps in Finland, and tackles the eugenics projects that took place there, and the impacts of Finnish nationalism on the Sami people in the North of the country.
Books Mentioned:
Land of Snow and Ashes - Petra Rautiainen
Memory of Ocean - Petra Rautiainen
Tree Killers - Petra Rautiainen
The Vegetarian - Han Kang
Is a River Alive? - Robert McFarlane
The Old Ways - Robert McFarlane
Landmarks - Robert McFarlane
Underland - Robert McFarlane
On the Calculation of Volume - Solvej Balle
Guest: Petra Rautiainen
Producer and Host: Mia Todd
Co-host: Francis Neale
Editing and Marketing: Hanna Todd
