The Ministry of Education and Culture has awarded director Selma Vilhunen the Finnish National Prize. Vilhunen is one of eight artists and groups to receive the award, granted in acknowledgement of a significant artistic career, achievement or promising breakthrough. The prize has been awarded since 1993 and amounts to EUR 24.700.

“With this year’s National Prize we wish to honor solid artistic know-how. These artists represent long-standing competence in, and impact on, the Finnish art field,” says Minister Sampo Terho.

Niklas Natt och Dag’s The Wolf and the Watchman has been chosen as Best Crime Novel of the Year by Adresseavisen. Adresseavisen is one of the largest daily newspapers in Norway.

Director, producer and screenwriter Abbe Hassan is the producer behind the critically acclaimed feature film A Hustler’s Diary (2017), which became one of the most successful Swedish films of the year. He has directed several short films, the latest being Gold (2017), which won ‘Best Short Film’ at the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival Kids, and the Grand Short Film Prize at the 2018 Seoul Guro International Kids Film Festival.

Hassan is currently writing the screenplay of the feature film Exodus, which he is also set to direct.

Niklas Natt och Dag and Fredrik Backman have each been shortlisted for a LiveLib Readers’ Choice Award 2018 in Russia. LiveLib is the biggest readers portal in the country, much in the vein of Goodreads. Natt och Dag’s The Wolf and the Watchman is shortlisted in the category ‘Best Crime Novel’, and Backman’s Britt-Marie Was Here in ‘Best Translated Novel of the Year’. The winning authors and titles will be announced on December 19th.

Click “Read more” below to see the full list of nominees and to cast your vote.

On this week’s Norwegian bestseller lists, Lars Kepler’s Lazarus once again comes in at No. 1 in the e-book category. Jørn Lier Horst’s latest installment in the Cold Case Quartet, The Innermost Room, comes in at No. 3.

Sofi Oksanen has been awarded a prestigious Medal of Honour by the French Order Ordre des Arts et des Lettres that recognizes significant contributions to the arts and literature, or the propagation of these fields, by French and foreign citizens alike. She receives the Chevalier (Knight’s) distinction, which in the past been bestowed upon the likes of William S. Burroughs, Alice Munro and Tim Burton. The ceremony which will see Sofi decorated is to be held at the beginning of 2019 in France. Oksanen has previously been the recipient of several major French literary awards, notably the Fnac- and Prix Femina Ètranger awards for her novel Purge in 2010.

Johannes Nyholm’s anticipated feature film Koko-di Koko-da will have its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and take part in its World Cinema Dramatic Competition. Nyholm attended the festival for the first time in 2012, then with his short film Las Palmas (the trailer of which has over 20 million views on YouTube).

Koko-di Koko-da follows a couple who, after a family tragedy, goes on a vacation in order to reconnect. They are confronted by their inner demons in the form of a surreal circus company that pulls them into a maelstrom of psychological terror.

Koko-di Koko-da is produced by Johannes Nyholm and co-produced by Maria Møller Christofferson, Beofilm in Denmark.

Each year, NPR – an American media organization serving as a national syndicator to a network of over 1,000 public radio stations in the U.S. – publishes The Book Concierge, an interactive, year-end reading guide. The books featured in the Concierge are chosen by NPR staff and literary critics, and are tagged with different categories such as The Dark Side (dystopias, true crime) and The States We’re In (the American experience, both true and fictional).

Simon Stålenhag’s international bestseller The Electric State can be found as a recommended read in six categories in the 2018 guide: Comics & Graphic Novels, Family Matters, For Art Lovers, Sci Fi, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction, The Dark Side, and The States We’re In. NPR adds the following review and motivation:

“Simon Stalenhag’s previous books – combinations of wild, gorgeous, photo-realistic alt-history art and tiny vignettes linked together into tight stories of people living in his imaginary pasts – have been focused on his native Sweden. But [The] Electric State is his first set in America, and it reads (and looks) like a nightmare travelogue of a young woman and her robot traveling across an American West ruined by war, populated by Lovecraftian machines and haunted by technological nightmares, in search of her missing brother. It is a sick and sweaty vision of an unlived era of American history, a post-human 1997 that never was, but almost could’ve been.”

Ivica Zubak is the director and co-writer of the critically acclaimed A Hustler’s Diary (2017), which became one of the most successful Swedish films of the year. A Hustler’s Diary was also nominated for ‘Best Script’ at the 2018 Guldbagge Awards and won the Audience Award at the 2017 Warsaw International Film Festival.

Zubak’s ability to confidently portray and imbue characters with a fresh originality has earned him the regard of the Swedish and international film industry.