Nature Wreckers

By Malin Kivelä

How can we bear to continue living as we do?
 
Malin Kivelä wants to get closer to nature. She is approaching fifty, her children have all grown up, and she, who would never have a pet, has given up and got a cat. Above all, she thinks about how we should live to make the only earth we have feel better.

Alone in the countryside by nightlight, armed with popcorn, Malin ploughs through literature about the wild men Pentti Linkola and the Unabomber, and of course reads the founding father Thoreau. She finds the Polish biologist Simona Kossak, who lived among the animals in Europe’s last great primaeval forest, and finally the controversial Californian ecophilosopher Donna Haraway.

But nature is not only romantic wilderness and endangered species, it is also destructive havoc in the body. The anxiety of responding to illness drives Malin towards the sea and surfing; it teaches her to surrender to the forces of nature and to see the beauty in what is bigger than herself.
 
READING MATERIAL
Sample translation 30 pp
Author letter
Reviews

Publishing information

Rights sold

About the author

Malin Kivelä (b. 1974) is a Finland-Swedish writer and playwright from Helsinki. She has published novels, children’s books and plays and also translated fiction from Finnish into Swedish. Her works have received several prizes and nominations, including the YLE Literature Prize for Annanstans and Hjärtat in 2013 and 2019, as well as a prize from the Swedish Academy in 2018. In her writing she is particularly interested in chasing the smallest nuances which might not even have a name, and in exploring the realms and limits of the written word as well as the physical dimensions and effects of text.