Rosa Liksom’s Hytti nro 6 (“Compartment Number 6”) is set during the year 1986, when the Soviet Union is beginning to open up. Two travellers, a girl and a man—a Finnish student and a 40-year-old Russian macho—take the train through Russia towards the mountains of Mongolia.
The winner of the Finlandia Prize for Fiction 2011 is Rosa Liksom, for her novel Hytti no 6 ('Compartment number 6’). The prize was awarded on 1 December. The winner was selected by the theatre manager Pekka Milonoff. ‘Hytti nro 6 is an extraordinarily compact, poetic and multilayered description of a train journey through Russia. The main character, a girl, leaves Moscow for Siberia, sharing a compartment with a vodkaswilling murderer who tells hair-raising stories about his own life and about the ways of his country. – Liksom is a master of controlled exaggeration. With a couple of carefully chosen brushstrokes, a mini-story, she is able to conjure up an entire human destiny,’ Milonoff commented.
