Petra Rautiainen’s Land of Snow and Ashes Longlisted for the 2023 Petrona Award
9 August 2023
Petra Rautiainen’s Land of Snow and Ashes Longlisted for the 2023 Petrona Award
We at Rights & Brands are thrilled to share that Land of Snow and Ashes (Tuhkaan piirretty maa, 2020) by Petra Rautiainen has been longlisted for the Petrona Award this year, which recognises the best Scandinavian crime fiction novels published in the UK!
Twelve crime novels from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland have made the longlist for the 2023 Petrona Award, competing to hold the title Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year. Remarkably, Rautiainen’s book is the only one to be originally from Finland.
You can see all the longlisted titles here.
The award is open to translated crime fiction, either written by a Scandinavian author or set in Scandinavia and published in the UK in the previous calendar year.
Petra Rautiainen’s powerful debut, Land of Snow and Ashes quickly became a critically acclaimed novel for its depiction of one of the darkest times in human history, and how it proceeded on Finnish soil during the Second World War. The book earned Rautiainen the Savonia Prize, and nominations for the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize, and the Lapland Literature Prize. The rights have been sold to 10 countries to date, and in 2022, The Guardian listed the book among the ‘best recent translated fiction.’
The Petrona Award was established to celebrate the work of Maxine Clarke, one of the first online crime fiction reviewers and bloggers, who died in December 2012. Maxine, whose online persona and blog was called Petrona, was passionate about translated crime fiction but in particular that from the Scandinavian countries.
Huge congratulations to our author Petra for this recognition!
The shortlist for the award will be announced on 7 September 2023.
