How We Met Your Mother

Kaj Korkea-aho

Original title: Hur man möter en mamma

Author: Kaj Korkea-aho

Published: 2024

Publisher: Förlaget

Genre: Literary Fiction

Pages: 240

Reading material:

Swedish manuscript, English sample & synopsis

2024 Finlandia Prize nominee in Fiction!

An autobiographical story about a gay couple’s journey to co-parenting

After eight years together, Kaj and Niko, living in Helsinki, decide to try to become parents. They start dating women, but the search for a co-parent seems impossible at first. What has to be right so that one could dare trust a complete stranger? Whose sperm cells should be used? How do you plan the future of a family that is outside the norms, in a society that is still coded heterosexually?

Kaj Korkea-aho’s autobiographical text about how three parents had a child is irresistibly touching, painful, and humorous. It bears traces of all forms of expression mastered by Korkea-aho - novel, podcast, blog, and drama - and can also be used as a kind of handbook for others in the same life situation. The book grabs the reader like a baby with its little hand and doesn’t let go until the book has been finished and the wonder of life has become a fact.

In this autofictional work, which challenges genre boundaries, the longing to become a parent is explored with raw honesty and an unforced style. The narrator contemplates what the moral lesson of the story could be: is it a tale of failure, or does hope find a happy ending? This creates a tension that is only released in the final lines. For the reader, the resolution of the protagonists’ journey offers a profound emotional experience, built upon strong empathy.

- Finlandia Prize 2024 Jury

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Rights sold:
FINLAND: Förlaget (orig.)

About author

Kaj Korkea-aho

Kaj Korkea-aho (b. 1983) is a writer, columnist and a comedian. Moreover, he has a career as an actor and a host in TV and radio. In his varied acting roles, he has often taken a stand for the rights of queer people, and his texts often discuss themes such as growing up, sexual minorities, religious revival communities and literature.

Korkea-aho has published four novels: Se till mig som liten är (God Who Holds The Little Dear) (2009), Gräset är mörkare på andra sidan (The Grass Is Darker on the Other Side) (2012), Onda boken (The Evil Book) (2015) which has been already translated into six languages and sold to Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, and now - Röda rummet (The Red Room) (2021). His books have attained wide readership in Finland and have scored several prizes, such as the The Swedish Literary Society’s prize in 2010 and 2013, the Thanks for the Book Award in 2016 and the Längmans Cultural Foundation’s prize in 2018. In 2017, Korkea-aho’s YA book Virala genier (Viral Geniuses) was nominated for the prestigious Finlandia Prize for children’s and young adult’s literature.

Since 2005, together with Ted Forsström, Korkea-aho has created comedy in Swedish for radio, TV and plays, whilst also writing the YA series Zoo! (the basis for the TV series Virala genier). Together, they also run the Ted & Kaj podcast, one of the biggest podcasts in Finland.

Kaj Korkea-aho was born and raised in the small town of Esse in Ostrobothnia, but now lives in Helsinki.

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Bibliography


2024, Literary Fiction

Kaj Korkea-aho

How We Met Your Mother


2021, Literary Fiction

Kaj Korkea-aho

The Red Room


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