Liksom, Rosa

The Finnish author Rosa Liksom was born as Anni Ylävaara in Övertornå, Lapponia, in the far north of Sweden where people on both sides of the border with Finland speak meänkieli dialect. Her parents were farmers and reindeer herders. At the age of seventeen she moved to Helsinki to study anthropology. She then read social sciences in Copenhagen and Moscow while working and participating in house occupations across Europe. She lived in the Copenhagen free district of Christiania for four years and spent several summers in Paris. She has also lived in Norway and Iceland, and she has spent a number of years in the Soviet Union under the Brezhnev era. She has been interested in the culture, language and society of Russia ever since she visited Murmansk at the age of sixteen, and she meant to work as a Russian teacher; instead she became an author. Liksom is also a visual artist and has exhibited internationally, she has illustrated her own books and she has produced a film. She has been living in Helsinki since 1987.