Tonight at Etana, we'll be crossing our tentacles
... as Maija Hurme's picture book, the recent White Ravens 2023, Kaikki löytämäni viimeiset (Etana Editions 2022), is one of the 14 candidates for the Nordic Council's 2023 Children's and Young People's Literature Prize, which will be announced tonight.
The winners of all five Nordic Council awards - in the fields of environment, music, film, literature and children's and youth literature - will receive a "Nordlys" award statuette and 300,000 Danish kroner (about 40,000 euros) as recognition for their unique work.
The live broadcast of the award ceremony from the Oslo Opera & Ballet starts at 20:30 Finnish time, and you can follow it live on the norden.org website.
Fourteen Nordic picture books, children's books and novels for young people have been nominated candidates for the 2023 prize from the whole Nordic region - from all countries and from all language areas. In addition to Maija Hurme's picture book, Ellen Strömberg's August award-winning young adult novel Vi ska ju bara cykla förbi (Schildts & Söderströms/Rabén & Sjögren, 2022) is the other Finnish candidate.
According to the pre-selection board, all the candidates are timeless and life-affirming adventures, where diversity is not the actual message of the story, but a fact that strengthens its credibility. The books examine new family structures, inspire the reader to look at the world with new eyes, and describe the friendship between children that defies language barriers and established operating models.
Pre-selection jury's rationale for the nomination of Maija Hurme's picture book:
[...] The work comes together into a whole that is striking, funny, sad, and calm, its form being part of the narrative and the story. The moments in a child’s life, captured here in words and images, are reminiscent of visual poems that allow wide-ranging interpretation. Life begins to reveal itself as an assemblage of fleeting everyday situations and transformative moments whose significance becomes apparent only later. Alla mina sistahelps the child to understand and interpret the varied, ambivalent feelings that are the inevitable companion of growing up, and it does so with amazing sensitivity and insight, and with deep respect for the child. [...]
Read the rationale in full here.
All the Nordic Council's 2023 children's and young people's literature award nominees can be found here.