Rosa
Liksom
Rosa Liksom was born in Lapland, in the Meän language area, and moved to Helsinki at the age of seventeen. She spent a wild youth traveling the world before exploding onto the literary scene as one of the most original and influential Finnish writers of our time. Notably, she is also the first Finnish writer to publish works in Meänkieli, a regional dialect.
Beyond her writing, Rosa Liksom is a prominent cultural figure whose art, films, and performance pieces have been exhibited widely. In 2011, she was awarded the prestigious Finlandia Award for her novel Compartment No. 6 and in 2020 she was given the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize.
No one writes like Rosa Liksom – brutality and coarseness in one sentence is matched by breathtakingly beautiful observations about the natural world in the next. Travels filled with adventure draw a line through her oeuvre, the human condition as reflected through a landscape unfurling beyond a train window. The dichotomy of human depravity to natural wonder is a recurring theme in Liksom’s prose, and from her pen flows life and history in all its unapologetic, uncensored complexity.
Rosa Liksom is the pen name of Anni Ylävaara.
pic. from the guest's archive