Book description
A Winter Book Selected Stories by Tove Jansson_
Translated
from the Swedish by Kingsley Hart, Silvester Mazzarella and David
McDuff. INTRODUCED BY ALI SMITH
Following the widely acclaimed and bestselling The Summer Book,
here is a Winter Book collection of some of Tove Jansson's best loved
and most famous stories. Drawn from youth and older age, and spanning
most of the twentieth century, this newly translated selection
provides a thrilling showcase of the great Finnish writer's prose,
scattered with insights and home truths. It has been selected and is
introduced by Ali Smith. The Winter Book features 13 stories from
Tove Jansson's first book for adults, The Sculptor's Daughter (1968)
plus 7 of her most cherished later stories (from 1971 to 1996),
translated into English and published here for the first time.
With afterwords by Philip Pullman, Frank Cottrell Boyce and Esther Freud.
The writer and artist TOVE JANSSON (1914-2001) is best known as
the creator of the Moomin stories, which have been published in
thirty-five languages. However, from 1968, she turned her attention to
writing for adults. Fair Play was her last novel, written when she was
seventy-five. Sort of Books have also published Tove Jansson's
classic The Summer Book (2003). A Winter Book: Selected Stories
(2006), draws from five collections to present the best of her short fiction.
Silvester Mazzarella is the editor and translator of The Poet Who
Created Herself; the letters of Edith Södergran (Norvik Press); and
Travelling Light by Tove Jansson. He translated six of the stories in
this collection.
Kinglsey Hart was the original translator of The Sculptor's Daughter
by Tove Jansson. 14 of these stories appear in this collection.
David McDuff's translations include both foreign poetry and prose.
He was the recipient of the 1994 TLS/George Bernard Shaw Translation
Prize and the 2006 Stora Pris of the Finland-Swedish Writers'
Association (Finlands svenska författareförening, Helsinki. David
McDuff was the translator of the story Taking Leave in this collection.
Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge,
England. She is the author of Free Love and Other Stories, Like, Hotel
World, Other Stories and Other Stories, and Girl Meets Boy. Her novel
The Accidental was named the 2005 Whitbread Novel of the Year and
shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize and the 2006 Orange Prize.
