Eva Wichman

1908 - 1975

Finland

Eva Wichman was the child of a doctor’s family in Helsinki, went to Centralskolan för Konstflit (the Central School of Arts and Crafts), worked as an artist and designer, and won a gold medal for her wooden toys in Milan in 1933 and in Paris in 1937. After she divorced her husband, the author Ralf Parland, after the war, she brought up their son alone. In the 1950s, she was a communist and worked as a journalist and writer. She died of lung cancer in 1975.

Her modernist debut stories Mania, 1937, were followed by intensive animal and nature fables in Molnet såg mig, 1942. Her modernist poetry spanning nature and ecstacy in Ormöga, 1946, and Den andra tonen, 1948, makes her one of the central Finnish war-time modernists. In the 1950s she tried out a new genre with poetry of political struggle, but after leaving the Communist Party, she returned to modernism with Det sker med ens (P), 1964, and Dikter nu, 1975.