Azerbaijani rights sold for 36 URNS by Sirpa Kähkönen!

We are thrilled to let you know that the Azerbaijani rights for Sirpa Kähkönen’s Finlandia Prize-winning and #1 bestselling novel 36 URNS: A History of Being Wrong have been acquired by Qanun! The deal was closed by Sten-Erik Tammemäe at Elina Ahlback Literary Agency. Most recently, rights were sold to Blessing Verlag (PRH) in Germany

Qanun, established in 1992, is one of the biggest publishing houses in Azerbaijan. Their list includes Nobel Prize-winning authors such as Herta Müller, Orhan Pamuk, Alice Munro, and Svetlana Alexievich, and internationally bestselling authors such as J. K. Rowling, Paulo Coelho, Cecelia Ahern, Dan Brown, Jo Nesbø, Haruki Murakami and others.

36 URNS has become one of the absolute highlights of recent Finnish literature:

• It is currently #1 bestseller in Finland in printed fiction and it is #2 on the Finnish bestseller chart across all formats and genres!
• The novel has sold more than 50,000 copies in Finland and is currently in its 6th print in Finland!
• It was the #1 bestselling title of 2023 in Akateeminen Kirjakauppa, the most prestigious bookstore in Finland!
• It won the Finlandia Prize in fiction literature, the most prestigious literary award in Finland!
• It is nominated for the Runeberg Literature Prize of 2024 and was nominated for the Savonia Prize of 2023!
• The novel has received universal acclaim from the critics and the readers!

36 URNS has so far been sold to 6 territories, but rights are still available for US, UK, Italy, France, Poland, Netherlands, etc!

Download the materials for 36 URNS here!

36 Urns: A History of Being Wrong

Sirpa Kähkönen

Winner of the Finlandia Prize 2023!
Nominated for the Savonia Prize 2023 & Runeberg Prize 2024!

A celebrated author’s masterful and poetic confession of love to her mother

• “A masterpiece worth living for” –  Jorma Uotinen, Finlandia Prize judge

Author Sirpa Kähkönen’s mother Riitta (b. 1941) died in March 2022 after a long illness. In life, she struggled to accept love. “I do not grieve your death, I grieve your life,” Sirpa Kähkönen writes, knowing fully well that her mother wouldn’t like the phrase. Her mother rejected love, despite longing for it the most. Riitta was athletic, beautiful, and gifted. A traffic accident at the age of 16 changed the course of her life for ever.

Drawing on her mother’s diaries, Kähkönen depicts the life of a 1950s girl and the dramatic change that followed the accident. The novel talks about community dance halls, a broken mind, flowing hems, a 1960s mother, anxiety, anger and hate, addiction, and moments of psychosis. It talks about how wars and other crises become corporeal, how violence is inherited, and how the culture of discouragement and submission is passed down through the generations in sayings and attitudes, with the author clearly seeing herself as part of the tradition of anger and violence.

The novel is permeated by a fiery love, as if an ancient Finnish spell that, with the power of words, is capable of bringing loved ones back from the dead.