FICTION: Katja Kallio, Kaj Korkea-aho, Martta Kaukonen and Jyrki Erra
NON-FICTION: Ismo Leikola and Angelika Leikola
YOUNG ADULT: A.R.S. Horkka

Please join us in welcoming them aboard, read more about the new exciting authors and their titles below and see our Fall 2021 catalogue here.Thank you!

Team EALA
Elina, Toomas, Ebba and Linda

FICTION: 
Katja Kallio is a critically acclaimed bestselling author and screenwriter. Since her striking debut on the Finnish literature scene in 2000, she has described the life and faith of misfit women at odds with the community, in modern and past times, with her distinctive voice and thoroughly visual style.

Kallio is praised for her accurate portrayals of the human mind. In her six novels she revisits themes such as the constant push-and-pull between distance and intimacy in a person’s life and the meaning of passion as a barrier-breaking force. Katja Kallio’s books have sold more than 180,000 copies in Finland.

Her new, much-anticipated novel THIS TRANSPARENT HEART, available in Finnish in August 2021, tells the forbidden love story of a young Finnish woman and a Soviet POW during WW2.

Young Beata returns home to war-torn Hanko in the winter of 1942. When she accidentally encounters a prisoner of war who sees directly into her innermost being, life changes irreversibly. Forbidden love puts Beata and Ivan at risk for their lives, but they can’t stay apart. In the moment of reckoning, Beata has to ask herself whether one can ever truly know their beloved – or even themselves.

Download English materials for THIS TRANSPARENT HEART here.

Kaj Korkea-aho is a writer, columnist and a comedian. Moreover, he has a career as an actor and a host in TV and radio. In his varied acting roles, he has often taken a stand for the rights of queer people, and his texts often discuss themes such as growing up, sexual minorities, religious revival communities and literature.

Korkea-aho has published four novels which have been already translated into six languages. and have scored several prizes, such as The Swedish Literary Society’s prize, the Thanks for the Book Award AND the Längmans Cultural Foundation’s prize.

Together with Ted Forsström, they run the Ted & Kaj podcast, one of the biggest podcasts in Finland.

Korkea-aho’s latest title THE RED ROOM describes lust and power colliding in an upscale apartment in fashionable southern Helsinki.

At first, it’s just a joke: a newspaper ad in which a young writer promises to write a book in exchange for an affordable apartment. But when a gentleman living alone offers him the home of his dreams, the young man finds himself involved in a remarkable game.

He begins to write a story that takes the reader to the labyrinth of desire and submission, to the nightlife of 1980s Helsinki, and to the intricate setups of relationships between men – but what is his place in it?

Download English materials for THE RED ROOM here.

Martta Kaukonen (1976) lives in Helsinki and is a film critic, whose reviews have been published in both Finland’s biggest newspaper Helsingin Sanomat and a popular women’s weekly magazine Me Naiset. Martta has a master’s degree in arts. She has interviewed the likes of Robert Downey Jr. and Justin Bieber. Martta met her future husband at his second-hand bookshop and fell in love.

Alongside writing, Martta loves psychological thrillers, film noir, flea markets, abandoned houses and travelling.

Martta’s debut novel GUIDE ME, BUTTERFLY was published in March 2021.

Ida, 20, a serial killer who was abducted as a child, starts therapy with celebrity therapist Clarissa. Only one of them knows that they share a mutual secret from the past. Will the other one realize it before she gets murdered?

Clarissa is a middle-aged psychotherapist, the best in her field. She is familiar to everyone from her TV appearances and from glossy magazines. For her, every patient is a princess. And someone only she can save. Or can she? Clarissa already has one suicide to answer for; a teenage boy’s death never seizes to haunt her.

When Ida becomes Clarissa’s patient, a cat-and-mouse game begins in which rules are followed by no one. The kind of game that never ends well.

Jyrki Erra, born in 1950, is an architect and an author. He lives and works in Helsinki with his spouse, who is also an architect.

As a counterbalance to his work as an architect and large design projects, in 2012 he published his first novel, a historical thriller named The Pages (Kaunasin sivut). This was followed in 2015 by The Hounds of Berlin (Berliinin ajokoirat), an espionage novel set during the final stages of the Cold War. Inspired by Roman events architecture and the discovery of a lost Caravaggio masterpiece, in 2020 he published LEAD WHITE.

Axel Wallas is a Finnish painter and Caravaggio expert, who is asked to consult a professor of art history about a painting that may be a masterpiece of Caravaggio himself. He is unable to give a definite estimate. The next morning the professor is found murdered and the painting is gone.

Surprisingly, Axel’s wife, Elina, has failed to return on her flight from Rome without telling him. Are the cases related?

Axel travels to Italy in search of his spouse, but finds himself in the middle of a devastating power struggle. How many lives does a painting worth millions require before it reveals its secrets?

Download English materials for LEAD WHITE here.

Ismo Leikola, known professionally also as ISMO, is the most successful stand-up comedian to come from Finland. He’s also an author, musician, screenwriter, and YouTuber.

ISMO made his United States debut in 2014 when he was awarded the title of “The Funniest Person in the World” in a contest organized by the comedy club Laugh Factory.

He became an internationally known stand-up comic after his 2018 performance on Conan O’Brien’s TV show and made history by being the show’s most-watched stand-up clip ever with over 90 million views on TeamCoco’s Facebook. He has also appeared on James Corden’s TV show and his talent in joking about language resulted in a collaboration with the prestigious Merriam Webster dictionary. He tours in the US and worldwide.

Angelika Leikola has been the hidden assistant-writer of her comedian husband ISMO for thirteen years. Angelika has a master’s degree in literature. She has also studied journalism and linguistics. Now the world is finally able to hear her own voice and humor through the couple’s collaboration in the book SURVIVING HOLLYWOOD WITH COMEDY.

Finnish comedian-writer couple arrives in Los Angeles. Is the city ready for them?

The authors share their personal story of navigating through the Hollywood comedy industry and the American way of life as a freshly arrived writer-comedian couple from a very different society.

As they examine this new world and how their old one looks from afar, they end up realizing their life is like an ongoing stand-up bit. And that the line between tragedy and comedy is truly so fine it’s in many ways non-existent.

Download the English proposal for SURVIVING HOLLYWOOD WITH COMEDY here

A.R.S. Horkka is also a pseudonym for wife-and-husband author-illustrator duo Riina and Sami Kaarla and author Anders Vacklin.The authors are already planning seven new Nordic Horror novels.

Riina and Sami Kaarla have worked for over a decade as an author-illustrator duo. They have written and illustrated dozens of internationally sold Moomin books based on characters created by Tove Jansson. Their latest children’s novel series, “Pet Agents” has also been an international success. Its rights are now sold to six countries.

Anders Vacklin is a prize-winning screenwriter, dramaturge, script doctor, creative writing teacher, and author of several non-fiction books on scriptwriting. He has written stage plays, musicals, and even a Virtual Reality game. Anders has also co-authored a YA novel-trilogy based on a script for a short film, a success at PAGE, BlueCat, and ScreenCraft screenwriting competitions.

Their new collaboration NORDIC HORROR is an anthology series. Each novel introduces a new main character with fast-paced, original, and fun-to-read plots representing different horror subgenres with a Nordic twist. Furthermost, the stories are honest and emotional studies of their protagonists – about the fears that have made them who they are and how they still have to face the biggest of them all in the form of a monster.

The first “season” of seven books has already been acquired by Tammi in Finland, and the first book Cold will be published in 2022.

#1: COLD 

“I don’t live in the cold, the cold lives in me.”

When six-year-old Armas loses his parents in a plane accident, he is sent to a remote orphanage in northern Lapland, where children are called “hot bloods” who need to be “cooled down.”
What people don’t know is that by “cooling down”, children are actually losing their emotions to demons. Now 16-year-old Armas has to get all his emotions back by killing every monster in the process, including the oldest and the most dangerous of them all – the demon queen called the Snow Lady.

Download more English materials about the NORDIC HORROR series here