On the Border

Flourishing in both Finnish and Swedish, contemporary writing in Finland is enriched by a consciousness of rapid change.Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Finland has been transformed from a rural grand duchy of Russia, via a traumatic civil war in 1918 and a bitter fight for survival in 1939-44, into an industrial, urbanised, independent nation. And since the beginning of the 1990s, the country's relationship with itself and with the world has been transformed by the political changes to its east and south, while its investments in high educational standards and high technology have been rewarded with record breakingly high unemployment rates.Such is the background of the writing in this anthologyjourneys of the imagination, interrogations of identity, voyages into other possible realities, chronicles of the tragicomedy of change: exploration, from the periphery of the shared realities of life and the imagination in Europe today.To mark the accession of Finland to the European Union, Carcanet publishes this anthology of prose, poetry and reportage selected from the journal Books from Finland by its editors, Hildi Hawkins and Soila Lehtonen.