Frans Eemil Sillanpää

Frans Emil Sillanpää was an outstanding Finnish writer.

The only Finnish Nobel Prize laureate in Literature. Along with admiration, there was also a controversial attitude toward Sillanpää, since in the interwar period, when the country’s cultural world was split in two, he took neither side.

The Finnish novelist Frans Emil Sillanpää was born into a peasant family in Hämeenkyrö, in southwestern Finland. Following local custom, his father, Frans Koskinen, took as his surname the name of the place where he lived: Sillanpää (literally, “bridgehead fortification,” “bridgehead”). More than ten years before marrying Louise Wilhelmine Isaksdotter, the elder Sillanpää moved to Hämeenkyrö, where his future wife’s family had lived for generations. After marrying, he built a small farm, where the future writer was born. S.’s older brother and sister died in childhood.

His parents, though poor, managed to save enough money for Frans to attend secondary school in Tampere. He studied diligently and received a scholarship that enabled him in 1908 to enter the University of Helsinki, where he studied biology, intending to become a doctor. At the same time, he met well-known people in the city and visited the Järnefelts, representatives of the literary and artistic bohemia. Although S. never completed university, his study of biology convinced him that human behavior is biologically motivated.

At the university S. read extensively, especially liking Strindberg, Maeterlinck, and Hamsun; he even said that Pan and Victoria had an intoxicating effect on him. Literature was for S. an outlet from the psychological problems that tormented him; he published his first stories in the capital’s magazines and newspapers while still a student and quickly became well known.

In 1913 S. left university, returned home, and began to write. His first novel, The Sun and Life (Elämä ja aurinko), was published in 1916. Later S. would laugh and tell how his publisher, in order to make him finish the novel, locked the hapless author in a hotel room. The Sun and Life, which tells of the summer adventures of three young people,