Join Riikka and her translator Tabatha Leggett in a conversation spanning literary representations of girlhood, the gaze of the camera in art, and the challenges of translating fragmented and metafictional narratives.
This event is organised by the Translation Exchange at Queen's College, University of Oxford and supported by the Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland, the Finnish Literature Exchange (FILI), and Scribe.
Philippa Laakso was many things to many people. Caring and selfish. Kind to some, cruel to others. And now, she was dead.
When seventeen-year-old Philippa’s body is found in the yard outside her home, the police launch an investigation. Everyone close to her is questioned: The elderly neighbour who discovered her body, who kept confusing Philippa with his late wife. The best friend, who hoards a secret stash of objects she’d stolen from Philippa over the years. The ex-boyfriend, still reeling from their sudden break-up months before. The woman who features, enraged, in some of the strange videos Philippa filmed on her beloved PEN Olympus camera. The older men she’d been meeting via a dating app.
Each tells a different story: she was a confidant, a fantasy, a temptation, a problem, a mystery, a mirror. But did any of them truly know her?
Enchantment is a spellbinding literary mystery that explores the uneasy terrain of girlhood, where one is always being watched, shaped, and judged by others. In it, Riikka Pulkkinen weaves a complex story of power, identity, and the fragile boundary between truth and fiction.
Riikka Pulkkinen was born in 1980 and studied literature and philosophy at the University of Helsinki. She is the author of True, which was published in seventeen countries and shortlisted for the 2010 Finlandia Prize for Fiction. The Limit, her debut novel, was a bestseller in Finland and the Netherlands, and won the Kaarle and Laila Hirvisaari prizes.
