Published in 1985, ‘A Day in Ostrobothnia’ (Finnish: Pohjanmaa) is a novel by Finnish author Antti Tuuri that won the ‘Nordic Council Literature Prize‘ in 1985. Antti Tuuri, a BSc in engineering, was born in Kauhava (Etelä-Pohjanmaa): he has written film manuscripts, opera librettos and theatre plays, but is primarily known as a novelist of wide, epic narrative. Many of his novels have been adapted into films, such as ‘The Winter War’, which deals with the Finnish Winter War and became one of the most successful Finnish movies ever. He also translated Icelandic sagas into Finnish. Even if ‘A day in Ostrobothnia’ actually deals with just one single day, the novel succeeds in depicting longer drawn-out social changes, for example how humans endeavour to adapt to new conditions. The author ‘paints’ a historic-social perspective by using ‘wide strokes’, but is no stranger to the more amusing aspects of individual life. Tuuri later expanded the novel into a large suite of novels, depicting a Kauhava family through several generations; the reader also gets to know Finnish emigrant environments in Canada. According to the Adjudicating Committee, in his novel “A day in Ostrobothnia” Antti Tuuri describes in a scanty, humorous style and with a background in a conflict-ridden epoch in Finland’s history, the contrasts between an old and a new order of society, as well as the contrasts between generations and between man and woman.
