The chill of an impending Finnish winter greeted the gaggle of indy publishers and English writers flown over by the British council to take part in this small but charming book festival in the Finnish capital last weekend. Like many of the lesser known Scandinavian book fairs, there was something refreshing about the event, especially from a publisher's standpoint ...
1. The general public are allowed in, and they can buy books too - take note London book fair.
2. You don't need a golf cart, pony or skateboard to travel round the miles of floor space - take note Frankfurt book fair.
We were here to meet with our Finnish equivalents on the invitation our kind host Iris Schwank and her staff at FILI - a kind of Finnish arts council for books.
My own imprint was here to take part in one of those in conversation spots (good when they go well, terrible when there's nothing to say) with our new author, Riitta Jalonen, whose book Tundra Mouse Mountain, we published this summer - the first Finnish children's book to be published in the UK since Tove Jansson's Marvellous Moomins.
Discussions over dinner later that day, in fact, centered around one of the themes of the fair: the state of national literatures and their future in this global publishing world - a subject of particular importance in the UK, where only 3% of books published are in translation (the figure's closer to 30% in most European countries.) When the fair came to a close, and with the bitterest wind of a Finnish winter descending fast, we travelled back together to Helsinki. The journey was bathed in magical Scandinavian light, and with it came the thought that there is something unique in each of our nations' books: an elusive voice of place, only noticed when it's thrown into relief by the literature of elsewhere.
