Published in 1991, ‘The Sun, My Father’ (Northern Sami: Beaivi, áhcázan) is a poetry collection by Finnish Sami author Nils-Aslak Valkeapää that won the ‘Nordic Council Literature Prize’ in 1991. Nils Aslak Valkeapää was an internationally active Sami cultural personality who grew up in a family of reindeer herders and was trained as a schoolteacher. His interest in spreading the Sami culture prevailed little by little: joiks, poems, songs, visual art, film music, political written works he produced a lot of materials on many different artistic disciplines. His home was in Beahttet, a town on the Swedish-Finnish border: he often felt lonely in big cities, but never on his farm in the open spaces among the winds, the river and the birds. ‘The Sun, My father’ is an epic about the Sami people: using images and poetry, he tells the story from the earliest known rock engravings until todays Sapmi. Moreover, the book can also be read as an internal voyage in Sami cultural consciousness with its intimate associations with nature and tradition. The book breathes justified pride in the strange ancient heritage but, at the same time, it wants to be understood in a modern, urbanised world. It is common knowledge that ‘The Sun, My Father’ has represented a great source of inspiration for many young artistically active Sami. According to the Adjudicating Committee “the author has created a work which links the past and the present, documentation and fiction in an untried and innovative form. The book gives expression to Sami cultural history and shows the readers the riches of the Sami language. The double and multiple substance of the words inspires the reader to reflection, gives the Sami faith and pride on behalf of the language and has a ground-breaking effect on all one dimensional use of language.”
