Cheeky Frawg Books Receives FILI Translation Grants for Books by Leena Krohn and Jyrki Vainonen

I mentioned this in passing awhile back, but I want to devote a more formal post to the news...In January, our Cheeky Frawg books was awarded two substantial translation grants from FILI, the Finnish Literature Exchange, funded by the Finnish Ministry of Education. One grant will allow us to translate a collection by Jyrki Vainonen to be entitled The Explorer & Other Stories and the other will make possible a translation of the iconic Leena Krohn's novel Datura. We'll have a schedule for publication in a few weeks. The translators for both books will be the husband-and-wife team of Juha Tupasela and Anna Volmari. We are extremely pleased that FILI approved our grant applications and cannot wait to bring these two books to an English-speaking audience.In addition, Jukka Halme and Tero Ykspetäjä are still editing a Finnish fantasy sampler for us, and we hope to have more announcements about Finnish translation efforts in the coming months. We believe we will be bringing out an ebook of Krohn's Tainaron, for example.In news from the same general area of the world, Cheeky Frawg will release Swedish writer Karin Tidbeck's first story collection in English (self-translated) in October. Tidbeck is an amazing writer and has her first novel coming out from Sweden's largest publisher in September---a writer to watch.We also will be running an article on Finnish Weird and an excerpt from a novel by Johanna Sinisalo on Weirdfictionreview.com.Tero posted awhile back on this blog about the differences between English and Finnish, and the more we delve into Finnish literature in translation, the more I wish I could read in Finnish (vain hope). If you missed Tero's post the first time, check it out in the archives of this blog. Here's a short excerpt.

Finnish is more equal. We don’t have gender-specific personal pronouns, there’s just “hän” meaning both “he” and “she”. This is sometimes a problem for translators, but otherwise pretty neat. It also means we don’t have a language-related problem with people who don’t identify either as a he or a she...

(Thanks to the Elina Ahlback Literary Agency for sending these books by Maarit Verronen and Jari Järvelä, received today.)