Author: Volter Kilpi

Volter Kilpi was born in 1874 in the southwestern Finnish archipelago municipality of Kustavi as the son of a captain. After studying in Helsinki, he pursued a career as a librarian. In his youth, he gained attention with three novels in the symbolist style, but then remained silent for almost 30 years until he became a significant writer with a large-scale trilogy about his homeland. The centerpiece of the trilogy, the novel "In the Hall of Alastalo" (1933), is now regarded as one of the best Finnish novels of all time. Kilpi died in 1939 in Turku.

Translation by: Stefan Moster

Stefan Moster, born in 1964 in Mainz, lives as an author and translator from Finnish in Berlin and in the Finnish town of Porvoo. In 2022, he was awarded the Helmut M. Braem Translator's Prize for his overall translation work, particularly for his translation of Volter Kilpi's "In the Hall of Alastalo" (mare 2021), which was also nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize and received the Jane Scatcherd Prize. In 2025, he received the Johann Heinrich Voss Prize for Translation for his translations of Finnish literature into German.