Annukka

Peura

Born 1st March, 1968, in Turku. Was
awarded the J.H. Erkko Prize for the
best poetry debut in 1989. Studies
literature, philosophy and Japanese at
the University of Helsinki.

'My first book, 'The Passenger of Chaos', was published in 1989. I was then 21. The book was a result of a gruelling, fast-lane life, although at bottom - as one of my friends described it - my life seems to be permeated by happiness. I chose poetry as my medium of expression, because it fitted best with what a book claims to be. My literary forefathers and mothers have been Sylvia Plath, Sappho, Marcel Proust and some wonderful chosen Finnish poets.
As a writer and as a person I am moving to new regions of experience, while saying good-bye to old ones. My former interest in Asian, particularly Japanese literature, is now giving way to an interest in Europe: modern French thought and literature, ancient Greek poetry, feminist criticism, mythology . . . I have faith in European ways of thought; as a European I want to know my background, its movements and dimensions. Asia is another dimension, not buried or forgotten, but at the moment latent, for me. A writer is a citizen of the mind, who has the chance of freedom - mentally, if not always physically. Intellectual passion makes this chance real. I imagine that in the realm of the word, a writer is given, not a passport, but a passe- partout: a universal key, a folding cardboard frame for defining things, and a pass that is valid everywhere!'

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