Monika Fagerholm

[Eric]

Monika Fagerholm (born 1961) is one of the more important and influential contemporary Finland-Swedish writers, and is popular both in Finland and Sweden. She started publishing her works in 1987 and has won several prizes.

Her works are:

Sham (idem), 1987 [short-stories]
Patricia (idem), 1990 [short-stories]
Underbara kvinnor vid vatten (Wonderful Women By the Water), 1994 [novel]
Diva (idem), 1998 [novel]
Den amerikanska flickan (The American Girl), 2004 [novel]
Glitterscenen (The Glitter Stage), autumn 2009 [novel; author putting final touches to manuscript]

Den amerikanska flickan / The American Girl has been translated into a number of languages and the novel has been filmed. The English translation will appear in 2009. The various other translations of The American Girl to date are with the following publishing houses: Norway, Pax; Finland, Teos; Denmark, Tiderne skifter; Netherlands, De Geus; France, Stock. It will also appear in German, Russian, Lithuanian and Serbian.

The American publishing house Other Press have bought the rights to the last two novels, and Glitterscenen will appear in English in 2010.

An interview with Monika Fagerholm can be found at:

New worlds - Monika Fagerholm interviewed by Silja Hiidenheimo

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From the Swedish Book Review:

Monika Fagerholm (b.1961) has become internationally known and acclaimed for her unusual novels about women and children who do as they please, who do not abide by the norms of language and behaviour. In Underbara kvinnor vid vatten (1994, tr. Wonderful Women by the Water, 1997) a mother leaves her son in order to pursue a beautiful life abroad, and in Diva (1998) a teenage girl obstinately and wonderfully transgresses the expectations of her environment of what a girl should be like. In her new novel, Den amerikanska flickan (The American Girl), Monika Fagerholm's exploration of boundary transgressions has moved to a further level of complexity. In the framework narrative we meet Eddie de Wire, who arrives from America to spend the summer in Finland, and becomes friends with some children in the area, but who then dies unexpectedly. What really happened, and the relationships between the various children and the adults around them, gives rise to a construction which resembles an oriental carpet. The finger – the reader’s searching gaze – runs over and through the detail, but loses itself before the line meets another natural line. Somewhere in the jumble of beautiful and vividly coloured detail is something which could be called the centre, and which everyone within the narrative, and the reader outside it, is searching for. Is this a case of murder? Does everything revolve around repeated betrayals and treachery? Perhaps it is not really important to look for a defined centre in this book: perhaps it is more stimulating simply to enjoy the colours, the depiction of 1970s culture, and above all the depiction of the relationship between two girls who give and take everything from each other. They lie close to one another and tell secrets, discover their bodies, give each other space simply to be. In spite of all the uncertainty which exists and moves around them, they proclaim a world of inner closeness and their own norms. Out of everything that one can admire Monika Fagerholm for – her texts are extremely original and daring – it is this feeling of transgressive closeness, not necessarily anything to do with sexuality, which stays with you, in your own body’s experience of reading.

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IMPAC nomination 1999:

Fagerholm, Monika

Wonderful Women by the Sea

(published in the USA as Wonderful Women by the Water)

translated from the Swedish by Joan Tate

ISBN: 1860462626 (UK); 1565844882 (USA)

Nominated by: Helsingin Kaupunginkirjasto, Finland; Borgarbokasafn Reykjavikur, Iceland; Stockholm Public Library, Sweden

Wonderful Women by the Sea tells the story of two would-be starlets in an age of consumerism and glamorous one-night stands. Spending their days sunbathing and their evenings at cocktail parties they seem to embody the American "good life". But dark undercurrents threaten to undermine the sanctity of their domestic oasis by the sea and the women can't avoid the social and political upheaval that explodes across the world in the turbulent summer of 1968. Monika Fagerholm was born and lives in Helsinki, Finland. Wonderful Women by the Sea is her first novel.

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One further link is that of the Finnish-language publishing house TEOS, that has published Glitterscenen in Finnish translation:

http://www.teos.fi/en/authors.php?id=1&start=a

Monika Fagerholm (b. 1961) is by far one of the most interesting and esteemed writers in the Nordic countries. Her books have been extremely well received in both Finland and abroad. She has been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Danish, Lithuanian, Dutch, Icelandic and Korean.