Frans Eemil Sillanpää

Frans Eemil Sillanpää was born in 1888 into a poor farming family in Hämeenkyrö, in western Finland. His parents nevertheless managed to send him to school in Tampere, where he did well, and with a benefactor’s help he entered the University of Helsinki in 1908 to study medicine. Among the acquaintances he made there were the painters Eero Järnefelt and Pekka Halonen, the composer Jean Sibelius and the writer Juhani Aho.

In 1913 he left the capital, returned to his home district and devoted himself to writing; his first novel, Life and the Sun, appeared in 1916. Opposed in principle to all violence and holding to a kind of scientific optimism, he portrayed rural people as living at one with the land. Meek Heritage (1919) traced the causes of the Finnish Civil War through the life of a landless labourer, and its even-handedness made it controversial. International recognition came with The Maid Silja (1931), the story of a young farm girl’s short life, and People in the Summer Night (1934) confirmed his gift for lyrical, impressionistic narrative.

In 1939 Sillanpää became the first Finnish writer to receive the Nobel Prize. Within weeks the Soviet Union attacked Finland; he travelled to Stockholm for the prize and gave his gold medal to be melted down for the war effort. His wife died that same year, leaving him with eight children, and a period of illness and alcoholism followed. From 1943 he returned to public life, and his Christmas Eve radio addresses, given annually from 1945 to 1963, made him a familiar national voice. He died in Helsinki in 1964.