Happy Little Island

Born in 1953, Lars Sund is a Finnish writer from the Swedish-speaking coastal town of Jakobstad, and his eight novels have all been written in Swedish. His last five novels have been translated into Finnish, and A Happy Little Island (En lycklig liten o, 2007) is his first book to be translated into English. Claes Olsson made a film called Colorado Avenue, based on Sund's books Colorado Avenue and Lanthandlerskans son. Colorado Avenue won two prestigious prizes for Finnish literary fiction: the Runeberg in 1992 and the Kiitos kirjasta-mitali (Thanks-for-the-Book Award) in 1993. Lanthandlerskans son took the Lars Widding Award in 1998, while Sund was nominated for the Finlandia Prize in 1997. Lars Sund, who studied English, Swedish and comparative literature at the Abo Akademi, the only exclusively Swedish-language university in Finland, now resides in Uppsala, Sweden.

"In A Happy Little Island, Sund entertains readers in the manner we now expect of him. He achieves this through his ability to invent and exaggerate, with a narrative force to match oral storytelling. He relies on his skilled use of language and his high spirits, humour and serious intent ... and also his empathy with the beliefs his characters hold." - Lyskamsken.net; "Despite all the tall tales, black humour and eccentric characters portrayed with gusto, the small society Lars Sund describes with his unfailing sense for language and visual description is wholly credible. The individual characters have their own way of expressing themselves, and the reader can really hear them. Every episode is visualised in the reader's head like a scene from a film." - Hufvudstadsbladet