Published in 2004, ‘Runoilijan talossa’ (‘In the poet’s house’) is a biographical novel by Finnish poet, novelist and translator Helena Sinervo that won the ‘Finlandia Prize‘ in 2004. Sinervo (born 17 February 1961) has published three novels, eleven poetry collections and three children’s books, and her works have been translated into more than 25 languages. Sinervo was born in Tampere in 1961 and she studied music: she was at the Tampere Conservatoire where she qualified to teach piano. Sinervo obtained her doctorate at Helsinki University and became a published poet in 1994; she spent a further year studying in Paris during the 1990s, and translated poems by the French poets Yves Bonnefoy, Maurice Blanchot and Stéphane Mallarmé. ‘Runoilijan talossa’ (‘In the poet’s house’) is a biographical novel based on the life of the Finnish poet Eeva-Liisa Manner who died in 1995. In the winter of 1971, writer Eeva-Liisa Manner looks at the sky through the collapsed roof of her house in Spain: the floors and furniture are damaged by rain, rotten wood and straw. There are unfinished manuscripts and translations. While clearing the dusty house, Eeva-Liisa finds letters and photographs that bring back old memories, and she is afraid of a repetition of the events of the previous summer, when both the country and the continent were shaken by an earthquake that destroyed the house, and the writer fell into psychosis. Was it attempted murder, or did she attempt suicide? The poetry collection ‘This trip’ (1954) brought Eeva-Liisa Manner to the forefront of our country’s writers: in Helena Sinervo’s perceptive biographical novel, Manner goes through her friendships, loves, the development of her writing and her relationship with her publisher.
