Frans Eemil Sillanpää

Frans Eemil Sillanpää was born on 16 September 1888 in Finland, and he turned his gaze to the people the wider world ignored—the peasantry whose lives were bound to the land and to nature in ways that cities had begun to forget. He wrote them with what the Nobel Prize committee in 1939 would call a deep understanding, an exquisite art in portraying their way of life and their relationship with the earth itself. He became the first Finnish writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died on 3 June 1964.