Kati Hiekkapelto – Finnish writer & artist living on the island of Hailuoto, Finland. (original) (raw)

News

Lasiavain-price

Kati Hiekkapelto’s the defenceless is one of the nominees for the Lasiavain 2016-price

The Petrona Award 2016 – Shortlist Announced

The Defenceless by Kati Hiekkapelto is announced as a nominee for the Petrona Avard 2016. The winning title will be announced at the Gala Dinner on 21 May during the annual international crime fiction event CrimeFest, held in Bristol 19-22 May 2016..

Tour in Serbia 2.- 5.11.

Tour in Hungary 28.10.-1.11.

28.10. Szeged, GRAND CAFÉ, 5pm
29.10. Budapest, Finn Nagykövetség, 8pm
30.10. Budapest, Fókusz Könyvház, 6pm

Tour in Germany

22.10. Berlin, Finnland-Institute, 7pm.
23.10. Münich, Glatteis Die Kriminalbuchhandlung, 8pm.
24.10. Braunschweig, Krimifestival, Hotel Deutsches Haus, 6pm.

Rights to publish The Defenceless in Denmark are sold to Turbine

The Defenceless mini-tour in UK

3.-7.9. London
8.9. Portsmouth
9.9. Corbridge
10.9. Derby
11.-13.9. Bloody Scotland festival Stirling

Biography

Kati Hiekkapelto was born in 1970 in Oulu, Finland. She made up her first stories at the age of two and recorded them on cassette tapes. The main characters in these early tales were elephants, elves and little girls. Kati worked as a local private detective between 1979 and 1982, and solved many serious crimes committed by her neighbours. By the age of twelve she had read all Agatha Christie’s novels, and was sure that her mother is going to poison her. In 1984 she had a bad hairdresser experience and became a punker. She´s been punker, environmental and human rights activist since then.

Kati has studied Fine Arts in Liminka Art School and Special Education at the University of Jyväskylä. The subject of her master’s thesis was racist bullying in Finnish schools. She went on to work as a special-needs teacher for immigrant children.

Today Kati is an international crime writer, punk singer and performance artist. Kolibri (The Hummingbird) was published in Finland by Otava in 2013 and Suojattomat (The Defenceless) in 2014. To date, they have been translated into seven languages. The Hummingbird was shortlisted for the Petrona Award in the UK in 2015 and_The Defenceless_ won the prize for the best Finnish Crime Novel of the Year 2014. The Defenceless was one of the top ten bestselling books in Finland last year, across all genres.

The main character in her books is a Senior Constable Anna Fekete. She is Hungarian, originally from Serbia, and she fled the Yugoslavian wars to emigrate to Finland when she was a child. Some of the key themes in Kati´s books are immigration and racism, and the experience of being an outsider. Her aim is to explore social and political themes through entertaining, page-turning crime stories, making her a natural successor to the socially aware Nordic Noir tradition started by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Kati has lived in Hungarian parts of Serbia herself and she speaks fluent Hungarian.

At the moment Kati is working on her third Anna Fekete novel, which will be published in Finland by Otava in Spring 2016. She lives and writes in her 200-year-old farmhouse in Hailuoto, an island in the Gulf of Bothnia, North Finland. In her free time she rehearses with her band, runs, hunts, picks berries and mushrooms, and gardens. During long, dark winter months she chops wood to heat her house, shovels snow and skis. Writing seems fairly easy, after all that.