Kari Hotakainen (b. 1957) brought his distinctive, personal voice to the Finnish literary scene in 1982. Since then he has published 20 works comprising poems, books for children and young people as well as novels. His most well-known work is the novel The Trench Road (Juoksuhaudantie), which received the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize in 2004, and has been translated into 22 languages so far.

Hotakainen constructs his relationship with the world explicitly through language: its jagged edges and voices are compressed into sentences where nothing is trivial. His protagonists are antiheroes whose dignity is long lost but who still embark on a furious crusade against illusions and misunderstandings that often are of their own making. Marlon Brando meets the Finnish suburbia, an everyman wants to get a house for his family, a lonesome policeman falls in love with a woman he is interrogating. Hotakainen pries the lid off everyday life for his studies and discovers unexpected meanings wherever he looks.