Over at International SF, Cheryl Morgan interviews Anne Leinonen, a Finnish writer and editor:
Cheryl: Anne, I know you mainly as a writer of excellent short stories, and also as a tireless promoter of your fellow Finnish writers through the Usva International magazine, but I gather now that you are starting to do very well with your novels.
Anne: I have been writing novels for ten years with my writing partner, Eija Lappalainen. We now have eight books published. We started with mainstream fiction, which is perhaps why you haven’t heard about my novels before. But we have been gradually introducing fantastical elements to the stories. For example, one book is set in Iceland, and has Icelandic elves in it.
Cheryl: Have you had any luck selling the books outside of Finland?
Anne: We’ve been with the same publisher all of the time, and they have been trying from the start to sell our books elsewhere in Europe, but until recently they haven’t had much money to invest in foreign rights sales. Now they have money and things are going much better.
Cheryl: Also you have been a finalist for a very major award, which must help. Tell me a bit about the book.
Anne: We had been adding more and more speculative elements to the books, and finally we came up with an idea for a science fiction trilogy, which we were able to sell to our publishers. The first book is called Routasisarukset, which means Frost Children. The book is set in Eurania, that‘s Europe 300 years in the future. There has been a golden age of machines, with humanity even traveling to the stars. But something went wrong. No one now knows what happened, but people are getting along as best they can in the ruins of civilization, trying to survive. – continue reading.
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