Laura Lindstedt & Sinikka Vuola

Rationale: 
In 1983, the sensationalist Finnish crime magazine Alibi published a news article about Finnish Anja B., who had shot her Norwegian husband, Thorvald. The court in Oslo handed down the historic verdict that the deceased was guilty, since he had abused his wife brutally for years. The decisive witness in the trial was the family’s teenage daughter. 

In their joint work 101 tapaa tappaa aviomies (in English: “101 ways to kill a spouse. A procedural murder mystery”), Laura Lindstedt and Sinikka Vuola create variations of the basic story through 101 styles, thereby illuminating it from different angles and creating different frames for what happened. The result is a delightfully intelligent, surprising, touching, funny, diverse, and Oulipo-inspired cavalcade of methods. The variations used include anagrams, limericks, ballads, sonnets, lullabies, and hyperbole. 

The work as a whole shows the violence that Anja is subjected to in its everydayness and immodesty, upsetting the traditional structure of crime novels where the story begins with the death of a young woman. In this work, the violent man dies no fewer than 101 times. 

Laura Lindstedt (phil. mag., born in 1976) is putting the finishing touches to her doctoral thesis on the French author Nathalie Sarraute’s tropisms and the problem of communication. Lindstedt’s second novel, Oneiron – fantasia kuolemanjälkeisistä sekunneista (2015), won the Finlandia Prize and was nominated for the Runeberg Prize and the Nordic Council Literature Prize. The translation rights for her most recent novel, Ystäväni Natalia (2019) (My friend Natalia, Liveright 2021, translated by David Hackston), have been sold to several countries around the world. 

Sinikka Vuola’s (phil. mag., born in 1972) debut poetry collection, Orkesteri jota emme kuule (2007), won the Kalevi Jäntti prize and her debut novel, Replika (2016), was nominated for the Runeberg Prize. Vuola is a member of the Mahdollisen Kirjallisuuden Seura Association, which explores prose methods. She, like Laura Lindstedt, is one of the authors of the procedural collective novel Ihmiskokeita (2016). In addition, she is the editor of the erotic poetry anthology Olet täyttänyt ruumiini tulella (2017).