I’m delighted to share a guest post with you from debut crime novelist Kati Hiekkapelto. Kati’s novel, Hummingbird, has been translated into English by David Hackston and published by the fantastic Arcadia Books. The novel will be launched at Bloody Scotland (19-21st September), where Kati will be appearing with Scots authors Craig Robertson and Malcom MacKay. I will also be meeting her there for an exclusive interview for Shots Magazine. I’m reading Hummingbird at the moment, and I’ll tell you now – it’s an absolute cracker!
Over to Kati to tell you a bit more about herself and her writing – enjoy!
Screaming seagulls. Thousands of wild geese, ducks and cranes gathering on the fields before flying back south. Silent forests full of berries, mushroom and game. Autumn wind. Green is turning to yellow and red, leaves are falling down, nature is getting ready for the winter.
Sea surrounds my island. Calm and stormy sea, different color and mood every day. Mood of my soul.
I am Kati Hiekkapelto, a writer, punk singer and performance artist. I live on an island called Hailuoto in Bothnic Gulf, Nothern Finland in an almost 170 years old farm house.
My first novel, Hummingbird, will soon be coming out in English. It is a crime fiction novel about a young policewoman, Anna Fekete, who lives somewhere in Northern Finland, in an imaginary seaside town without a name. Anna is an immigrant from former Yugoslavia. She escaped to Finland with her mother and older brother during the Yugoslavian civil war at the age of 10. Ethnically she is Hungarian. There is a relatively large Hungarian minority still living in Serbia and Anna´s hometown is Magyarkanizsa, which is a real place.
Anna starts her job as a crime investigator after being in uniform for years. It is not necessarily easy to be a woman in a male dominated workplace, and being an immigrant woman can be even more difficult. Anna has to face lots of prejudices, especially from her partner Esko, who is a middle aged, alcoholic, typical Finnish redneck man.
A jogger is found shot by a shotgun in a remote jogging path near the sea. Police find a necklace in her pocket. It is an amulet of an ancient Aztek god, The God of Death. When another jogger is found with the same amulet in his pocket, police begin to fear that a serial killer is in their midst.
At the same time a young Kurdish girl calls 911. She says her father wants to kill her, but later she denies everything. Anna remains suspicious about the honour related violence and even when the police have to stop the investigation, she keeps her eyes on the family in her free time. Anna starts to have sleeping problems and burn out symptoms, and difficulties at work and in her private life. Too much smoking and drinking, and not doing her regular sports anymore, doesn’t help.
Hummingbird is the beginning of series about Anna Fekete. The second novel came out in Finland in last February. I hope it will be in English too! It is a story about illegal immigrants, drugs, gangs, impossibilities and possibilities to go back home; how these possibilities are so enormously and unfairly different within different people.
My main interests as a writer are in questions of immigration, minorities, being an alien, losing the mother tongue, racism, and human rights. I have written my Master’s Thesis on racist bullying among young immigrants in Finland, I have worked as special education teacher for immigrant pupils. My personal life is full of foreigners. I have lived in Serbia in Anna Fekete´s Hungarian hometown and I speak fluently Hungarian. So, these themes are familiar to me although, I myself belong to the majority and therefore I´m also part of the oppressive machine. But as an artist I feel that my duty is to give voice for those who don´t have it yet in our society. Perhaps that was one of the reasons I started to write crime fiction. In Scandinavia crime fiction has a long history of being position-taking in social problems. My punker background supports this. I have been some kind of an activist since I was 12 years old. I want to give my readers something more to think about than just who is the murderer.
The main reason for me to write, after all, is the passion. Writing is an inner must that I cannot escape. It is my way of thinking, breathing, surviving, creating, suffering, enjoying, living. Writing is my forest, my sea.
Susi (S.J.I) Holliday: Author 
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