Background
Frans Eemil Sillanpää was born at Hameenkyro on September 16, 1888. He was the son of a tenant farmer living in modest circumstances.
Frans Eemil Sillanpää was born at Hameenkyro on September 16, 1888. He was the son of a tenant farmer living in modest circumstances.
Nevertheless Sillanpää obtained primary and secondary schooling that enabled him to enter the University of Helsinki in 1908. At the university he devoted himself for some four years to natural science but took no degree.
Drawn into artistic circles that flourished in pre-World War I Helsinki, he abandoned his scientific pursuits and turned to writing as a career. His debut as a novelist came in 1916, when Elämä ja Aurinko (Life and the Sun) was published. In 1939 he received the Nobel Prize in literature. The 23 years that separate the beginning and the apex of Sillanpää's career as a writer witnessed the appearance of a substantial number of novels and short stories. Much of his writing is colored by a starkly realistic approach; he has been called the first social novelist of Finland. While he is a skillful delineator of the facts and circumstances that determine and direct the life especially of anonymous lowly folk, his novels also reveal great capacity for plumbing the psychological aspects of human experience. This was shown in his first notable success in 1919, when he published Hurskas Kurjuus (an almost untranslatable title that may be rendered as "Sacred Misery"), dealing with the fate of a miserable individual brought to a tragic end by the war of independence. Sillanpää's best-known work abroad, Nuorena Nukkunut, appeared in 1931 and has been published in English translation as Silja. His novels have been translated into 18 languages, including Hebrew and Japanese, but it is in Scandinavia, especially in Sweden, that he has long enjoyed a particular vogue. Sillanpää died in Helsinki on June 3, 1964.
(Book by Sillanpaa, Frans)