Väinö Linna

Väinö Linna was born in Urjala on 20 December 1920, the seventh child of a butcher who died when he was eight. After six years of school, he left at eighteen for Tampere, where he worked at the Finlayson mill. Mobilised in 1941, he commanded a machine-gun group for two years, then was assigned to training; in 1945 he married Kerttu Seuri and returned to the factory, educating himself on his own. He published two novels in 1947 and 1948, then a trilogy on the civil war of 1918, and received the Nordic Council Prize in 1963. He died in April 1992 near Tampere.

In the catalogue 1

• NovelThe Unknown SoldierTuntematon sotilasVäinö Linna · 1954Literature