Oksanen, Sofi

The Finnish author and playwright Sofi Oksanen had a major impact on the literary scene in the first decade of the 21st century. Her father, a Finnish electrician, was working in Tallinn – then capital of the Soviet Republic of Estonia – in the 1970s, and that was where he met Oksanen’s mother. The couple moved to Finland where Oksanen grew up in Jyväskylä, a city north of Helsinki. Summers were spent in her mother’s native village near Haapsalu, south of Tallinn. As a result, Oksanen is bilingual and describes herself as a Finnish-Estonian author.