Juhani Karila and Lola Rogers

Juhani Karila and translator Lola Rogers, member of the Northwest Literary Translators, discuss Karila’s recently released novel Fishing for the Little Pike, the story of three days spent trying to catch a fish while fooled and foiled by an assortment of primeval nature beings in Finnish Lapland.

In Fishing for the Little Pike, Elina Ylijaako has returned to her home village in Eastern Lapland, as she does every year. She has three days to catch a pike. When a water sprite emerges from the pond and other ancient creatures soon join the game, Elina’s fishing trip turns into a life-or-death adventure. Meanwhile a police sergeant named Janatuinen is searching for Elina on suspicion of murder. But first the sergeant has to survive a fishing trip of her own with a local forest imp and make it through hex-night–a carnival of the dead that even the most hard-blooded witch in the village knows to avoid. Mysterious creatures wander the tundra bogs like machines set in motion long ago that nobody knows how to turn off. An ancient demon finds a new home in the mayor. A farm hand who refuses to die starts sprouting branches and oozing menace. And in a little pond in the middle of the swamp lives the fish that everything depends on.

Juhani Karila is an award-winning author and journalist with a master’s in communication theory. In 2010, Karila won the J.H. Erkko Award, and his first collection of short stories Gorilla (2013), was nominated for the Helsingin Sanomat Prize. His second collection, The Death of the Apple Crocodile (2016), is a series of connected stories about the collision of large and small worlds. Karila’s debut novel Fishing for the Little Pike was awarded the Kalevi Jäntti Prize, Tähtifantasia Prize, and the Lapland Literature Prize.

Lola Rogers is a full-time literary translator living in Seattle. She has translated novels, short stories, children’s books, comics, and poetry. Lola's translation of Sofi Oksanen’s novel When the Doves Disappeared was a finalist for the 2016 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and her translation of Johanna Sinisalo’s The Core of the Sun received the 2017 Prometheus Award. Lola is a founding member of the Finnish-English Literary Translation Cooperative.

For more details and to buy the book, click here.

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***Please note that NOTIS is not organizing for sponsoring this event.***