Auteur

Kerttu Vuolab is from the Finnish side of Deatnu, the Tana River. She has long been known as a childrens
and young adults’ author, with publications based on Sami legends, oral stories, and traditional knowledge. One of her books is even equipped with a backpack symbol that appears throughout, in which can be found good advice to parents and daycare personnel about different ways to tell the stories to children, so that the content will be exciting. Another motif for Vuolab is the boarding school experience, as described in Čeppári čáráhus (The Damned Clever One), from 1994. Boarding schools formed an important part of the authorities’ assimilation policy. School-aged children were taken from home and placed in boarding schools, where they weren’t allowed to speak Sami or practice Sami traditions.

In her novel Báibmoáirras (Messenger from the Land of Snowbirds), from 2008, Vuolab made the transition to literature for adults, though oral tradition still remains central. The book maintains a mythical backdrop, with a cosmic perspective, using the form of an adventure novel to bring the reader along on a journey uniting children’s tales with mythical origin stories. The narrative takes place on three levels simultaneously: the mythical, the fantastic and the realistic. To a certain degree the book is a hybrid, including technical explanations, a forword, and afterword, and a vocabulary list, as well as photographs of the author herself and her relatives and other pictorial collages made by the author. This gives the reader an impression of reading a creation story while at the same time living within the narrative’s mythical universe. In a way the book unites a collective Sami story with an individual narrator’s perspective in the representation of a journey made by three sisters. Báibmoáirras was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2011. (bron: Harald Gaski - Whispering Treasures 2012)

Publicaties

Overzicht publicaties (met vertalingen):

2008, Báibmoáirras
2005, Čomisteaddjit
1994, Čeppári čáráhus
1990, Ande ja Risten Jági farus
1979, Golbma skihpáračča

Het overzicht van de originele publicaties is niet per se compleet. Ik streef om praktische redenen geen volledigheid na.

Vertalingen