Sort of Books chosen by Wiki as one of seven Book Publishers around the world who are Finding Fresh Voices→

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Sort of Books chosen by Wiki as one of seven Book Publishers around the world who are Finding Fresh Voices

We’re so proud to be recognised by Wiki as a publisher who helps bring compelling works from talented authors to market. As they say, “The big publishing houses may have all the resources and money, but they hardly have the last word when it comes to releasing great literature to the public; the smaller, independent presses are just as worthy, and often have even more unique and interesting catalogs of titles.”

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Cast for the film TOVE announced!→

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Cast for the film TOVE announced!

The director of the film is Zaida Bergroth, a highly acclaimed Finnish director for which this will be the fifth feature-length drama. She says that Alma Pöysti has all the right characteristics for the role of Tove Jansson. “When I searched for an actress to portray Tove Jansson, I was looking for someone who would have that right Tove-like energy, and who could credibly play a person who created something as amazing and imaginative as the Moomins. Alma Pöysti’s version of Tove combines intelligence and melacholy as well as humour and flirt in a wonderful way. I am very excited to be able to present such an incredible actress to a large audience”, Bergroth says.

Vivica Bandler is played by Krista Kosonen and Shanti Roney plays Atos Wirtanen.

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Listen to Letters from Tove on BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK→

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Listen to Letters from Tove on BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK

Tune in to BBC Radio 4 at 9.45 everyday this week to hear Sarah Lamble reading extracts from Letters From Tove by Tove Jansson. Episode One introduces listeners to the young Tove Jansson, arriving as an art student in Paris and coping with the misogyny and hazing rituals meted out to novices at the eminent École des Beaux-Arts.

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Letters from Tove: Casual brilliance and beauty IRISH TIMES REVIEW by Anna Carey→

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Book review: Tove Jansson’s letters offer a wonderful insight into the Finnish author’s curious, intelligent, funny and unsentimental mind

“The personal correspondence of writers feeds on leftover energy,” the novelist and New Yorker fiction editor William Maxwell wrote in his 1982 introduction to a collection of his correspondence with his friend Sylvia Townsend Warner. “There is also the element of lavishness, of enjoying the fact that they are throwing away one of their better efforts, for the chances of any given letter’s surviving is 50-50, at most. And there is the element of confidence – of the relaxed backhand stroke that can place the ball anywhere that it pleases the writer to have it go.”

Letters From Tove, a wonderful collection of letters written by the Finnish artist and writer Tove Jansson is full of such examples of casual brilliance and beauty; Sarah Death’s seemingly effortless translation preserves the clear-eyed grace and humour that was a hallmark of Jansson’s writing, from her beloved Moomins stories to her adult fiction.

Editors Helen Svensson and Boel Westin have divided the correspondence by recipient rather than following a chronological approach. And so, for example, after reading the letters she sent to her good friend Eva Konikoff from 1941 to 1967, the reader jumps back to 1943 to read her letters to another friend. Although just a little more biographical detail might have been helpful at times (I did find myself turning to Westin’s excellent biography of Jansson for more information on certain things), the book is remarkably coherent, with the overlapping correspondences offering a rounded picture of Jansson’s life and relationships.

While the letters document Jansson’s friendships, romances, family dynamics and travels (and, notably, her experience during the second World War, when Finland fought against the Soviet Union and Jansson clashed with her father over his pro-Axis views), the importance of her creative work runs through them all. After her art student days in the 1930s she would work as a painter, an illustrator, a designer of sets, a creator of comic strips and of course the author of novels and short stories for both adults and children.

Moomin success

In her letters she writes about the pleasures, challenges and frustrations of her work, highlighting its crucial role in her life. Her descriptions of her creative processes, whether she’s painting a fresco or writing and drawing a Moomins comic strip, are always fascinating and insightful, all the more so for being written so casually, taking up a few paragraphs between family gossip or witty accounts of trips abroad. Even when her loved ones’ creative work frequently physically separates her from them, as it often does, Jansson is always understanding and accepting. And fans of the Moomins will enjoy her amusing accounts of Moomin merchandising deals (“We’re drawing the line at food. ‘Mmm, Moomin!’”).

The book also offers a fascinating and often moving glimpse into the world of queer women in mid-century Finland. Jansson had multiple relationships with men (some of whom, like Atos Wirtanan, remained lifelong friends) before deciding that, as she writes in a 1952 letter, “the happiest and most genuine course for me would be to go over to the ghost [ie lesbian] side”.

In one 1956 letter, written while hosting a group of lesbian friends, Jansson describes her guests’ “high spirits at finally having the freedom to be natural and talk about ghost matters without lowering their voices”. In the mid 1950s she began a relationship with a fellow artist, Tuulikki Pietila, known as Tooti, who would inspire the wise character Too-ticky in Moominland Midwinter. They would remain together until Jansson’s death in 2001, and Jansson’s letters to her partner are some of the most loving and charming in the book.

“Today I am not so much a tree as a bouquet,” wrote Jansson to her then girlfriend Vivica Bandler in 1947. “A bouquet with colours and bees and honey (and thorns and spiky grass).” This collection presents us with that bouquet in all its vivid freshness, and offers readers the privilege of spending time inside an intelligent, creative, curious, generous, funny, unsentimental mind. Few books have given me as much pure pleasure this year.

VOICE OF THE WOOD - an extract from SURFACING by Kathleen Jamie

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VOICE OF THE WOOD - an extract from SURFACING by Kathleen Jamie

Voice of the Wood

SO YOU’VE REALLY GONE AND DONE IT THIS TIME you are lost in the wood how did that happen? The crazed Scots pines camped all around and blaeberries beneath and bracken shrivelled because it’s October and you stand hearing nothing, the non-sound of one leaf dropping to join its siblings on the ground…

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A Brilliant Q&A with Letters from Tove editors Boel Westin and Helen Svensson

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A Brilliant Q&A with Letters from Tove editors Boel Westin and Helen Svensson

“There is an immediacy and a presence in many of the letters that is hard for any biography to capture. The reader is drawn into a here and now which become both alive and concrete. Sometimes it’s like a diary, intimate and close to the heart, and sometimes it’s narrated like a novel, you just want to read more.”

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Surfacing is Guardian Book of The Day→

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“First, there’s the quality of the noticing eye, the poet’s ability to look deeply at a landscape, a person, a situation, and then to summon it on the page with what Robert Lowell called “the grace of accuracy”. Then there’s Jamie’s particular talent for nature writing, the way that she weaves eagles, ragwort, snow buntings, caribou and all the rest of the natural world into her prose so that they lose the otherness that can distance them from our experience. Nature in Jamie’s writing is immediate, domestic and, well, natural… a book whose impact is accretive and, eventually, astonishing.”

What remains, what surfaces, is what preoccupies us as we, and the world, sense loss – of glaciers, habitations, ancient knowledge: Read Kathleen Jamie interviewed by The Tablet

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Surfacing
KATHLEEN JAMIE
(SORT OF BOOKS, 256 PP, £12.99)
Tablet bookshop price £11.69 • Tel 020 7799 4064


“It’s seven years since Sightlines, and seven years more since Findings, the collection which heralded a renaissance in landscape writing. Then, musing on Findings’ gestation, she said, “the draw for me is the sense of time, of the long past still being with us”. The public loved her simplicity, the mix of the domestic with the natural world. The collection defied classification: “We had a horror … of it turning up in the body, mind and spirit section”. Its runaway popularity, she thought, was because “it’s land and landscape described by an indigene. Not someone arriving as a tourist.”

Time moves on. Surfacing (oddly, the name of a rather good Margaret Atwood novel – I wonder if anyone noticed, because the themes are similar) – is about retrenching, ageing, surviving, rethinking things. 

We meet the Yup’ik, from Quinhagak. They’re soft-spoken and shy – as are rather a lot of the folk Jamie meets. The permafrost is melting, yielding up ancient artefacts; enter the archaeologists. “For generations the frozen earth had held these objects fast, like charms in a Christmas cake.” That’s quintessential Jamie – using the known to explain the ancient. Also quintessential, the dry awareness that, as an essayist, an interloper, she’s an ­outsider.

“I said I was a writer … but it sounded lame … they’d had long long years of Europeans colonising and disparaging … then suddenly we were here supplicating, marvelling at their relationship with nature.”

“Just tell ’em we don’t live in igloos.”

“I will.”

So she tells us how they do live – they have a general store, they interrupt a tale about hairy Arctic monsters to answer their mobile phones, they take shop cake on fishing trips.
We meet folk in Orkney trying to document an eroding Neolithic site. “Everything that was chucked away at Skara Brae, or not recognised, we have here.” But the funding is imperilled. What to do? Make it a public, commercial site like the Ness of Brodgar? No, say the diggers ...

“We can’t look to the EU any more … if we were to raise money by opening the site … we’d need toilets … cruise ships.”

There are boxes and boxes of things which have surfaced, heading to Aberdeen. It’s the biggest Neolithic assemblage in the UK. Jamie holds mace heads, beads, pins, scrapers.
“Does this matter?” she asks. “Do we want to know where we’re coming from as we cruise into the future?”

This, it turns out, is the crucial question which makes Surfacing an unsettling read. She gets ill. Her marriage erodes. Her father dies. She searches for memories of her granny, she watches her children leave, she collects china fragments – “dropped by accident, thrown in a temper ... they fill your hands, these fragments … you cast them back”.

What remains, what surfaces, is what preoccupies us as we, and the world, sense loss – of glaciers, habitations, ancient knowledge – and powerlessness. That’s what makes Surfacing a new departure; it feels like Jamie is talking about endings.”

New feature drama film about Tove Jansson to premiere in 2020

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By acclaimed Finnish director Zaida Bergroth Tove is the story of Tove Jansson – artist, lover, author, icon.

The film focuses on her formative years in post-war Helsinki, her fight for recognition for her art and the passionate bisexual love affair that was mirrored in the internationally beloved Moomin books. This is the period covered by the inspiring and revelatory Letters from Tove (which Sort of Books are publishing in Oct) edited by Boel Westin and Helen Svensson and translated by Sarah Death. Casting is in process. Watch here for news.

The upcoming feature-length drama film Tove will be shot in Tove’s native language Swedish and filmed on location in her hometown Helsinki and other places that were central to her life and art.

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Listen to Bill Nighy reading The Invisible Child.

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The Guardian have just broadcast a special reading by Bill Nighy of our Moomin title for Oxfam, The Invisible Child, a book that has changed lives. It’s a very rare treat. See Moomin and Oxfam’s reports on the amazing projects funded by the proceeds of this bestselling gem of a book.

Sophia Jansson: “Standing up for what you believe in is central to the Moomin way of life”

We’re so proud to be continuing this association with Oxfam/Moomin/Waterstones.

Actor/director Samuel West on Tove Jansson’s most Theatrical Title

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“This beautiful new edition puts Jansson’s Comedy of Errors where it belongs: centre stage”

Actor/Director Samuel West on the theatrical imagination behind Tove Jansson’s glorious midsummer title

It’s the World Cup. As I write, on Midsummer Night, Sweden are 1-0 up against the champions Germany. A time of heady excitement if you’re Scandinavian, although underneath lies the fear of last-minute disappointment. This is why we trust Tove Jansson; she shows us joy, tinged always with possible sadness. 

Jansson was a lover of the theatre (and the lover of a theatre director, Vivica Bandler, to whom Moominsummer Madness is dedicated). She knew her theatrical onions: I learned the superstition about not whistling on stage from Emma the Stage Manager Rat long before I learned it from following my parents around the theatres of Europe.

Inspired by the magical traditions of Scandinavian midsummer, this has always seemed to me the strangest of the Moomin books, a true midsummer night’s dream. Published the same year as the Moomin comic strips began and sharing their episodic oddness, there’s a decidedly trippy vibe about proceedings. The Moomin family take refuge from a great flood in a floating theatre, and are changed and inspired by their surroundings – at first disappointed that nothing is real, but later realising the freedom this gives them to be heroic and silly and different. When the floating theatre runs aground, Jansson breaks the fourth wall and releases her theatrical imagination out into the world: Snufkin’s showdown with the Park Keeper, in which he sows Hattifattener seed and harvests them like mushrooms, is a brilliantly designed set piece. (This is the book in which Jansson lets her anarchy rip; the bonfire of signs forbidding things still inspires me, and has led to rows with my partner. When I see a notice saying I can’t do something, I get very Team Snufkin). 

Like a world-in-negative Moominland Midwinter, with its frozen ground and hard emotion, here all is soft and wet and free. The Swedish title is Farlig Midsommar, “Dangerous Midsummer”, but in fact the disasters (an earthquake, a great flood, being lost and separated) are just opportunities to grow and be brave. The real danger here is emotional: the young cast dare each other to stay up all night and be changed, like Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night of the following year. 

“All ends happily of course”, Tove wrote to a friend. We meet the shadows and illusions and they become our friends. The theatre is a place to dream in public; at the heart of this book lies its transformative power to welcome and heal, to thrill and transform.

Moominsummer Madness sits happily in the middle of the Moomin canon. A book for everyone and their parents, this beautiful new edition puts Jansson’s comedy of errors where it belongs: centre stage.