The non-fiction work And Then Our House Became a Ship explores the experiences of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers. For the book, writer Kateryna Yehorushkina spent three years collecting testimonies. The result is a hybrid form combining essays, diary entries, and literary reportage.
The translation is being prepared by Eero Balk, the recipient of the 2024 Drahomán Prize.
The publishing house WSOY, which will release the Finnish edition, is celebrating its 148th anniversary this year. It is part of the Bonnier Group publishing conglomerate (Sweden, Germany, the United Kingdom, among others). As Yehorushkina notes, it was WSOY that first published Tove Jansson’s Moomin books in Finnish. “When I read them as a child, I had no idea that one day we would be together in the pages of an autumn catalogue,” she said.
The author also shared the story of how she met the Finnish publisher:
“Once I was asked to help foreign volunteers with their mission in southern Ukraine. I found a week between trips and we set off. The volunteers were giving children deprived of parental care books, sweets, and stationery, while I was running art therapy sessions, trying to support, inspire, and offer tools for self-help.
We spent many hours travelling through the Mykolayiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions, sometimes watching ‘star wars’ in the fields along the roadside. It was during those days that Laboratoria announced the pre-sale of my book, and we decided to celebrate over dinner.
Among the volunteers were foreign publishers. We started talking and I was asked to send a synopsis and a few chapters in English. I prepared everything, translated it, and about a month later I received a message: ‘I would like to inform you that we want to publish your new book in Finland. It is a powerful and moving testimony not only of the ongoing war of terror against Ukraine, but also of the remarkable strength of the human spirit.’”