Frans Eemil Sillanpää

Born Sept. 16, 1888, in Hämeenkyrö; died June 3, 1964, in Helsinki. Finnish writer.

Sillanpää studied at the University of Helsinki. His novel Meek Heritage (1919; Russian translation, 1964), which is drawn from the life of the Finnish peasantry, presents a realistic picture of the Finnish civil war of 1918. The novella Hiltu and Ragnar (1923) tells the tragic story of the daughter of the main hero of Meek Heritage. In the novel The Maid Silja (1931), Sillanpää showed how bourgeois relations penetrated the Finnish countryside and portrayed the lot of the impoverished peasants. Psychological insight is characteristic of such works as the collection of novellas Human Children in the March of Life (1917) and the novels Life and Sun (1916), A Man’s Road (1932), and People in a Summer Night (1934). The books A Young Fellow Lived His Own Life (1953) and I Tell and Depict (1954) are largely autobiographical. Sillanpää received a Nobel Prize in 1939.