Active reading put me on the road to becoming a writer. When I was a child, my parents always read bedtime stories, and sometimes these sessions really stretched out.

In school, I had a hard time learning to read. I thought I was clever when I learned by memorizing syllable formations, thinking that’s how it’s done. Wrong. It wasn’t until a special needs teacher began helping me learn what reading really is, that everything fell into place. After that I read every book I could find at my local library, and I devoured comic books, movies and TV shows just as voraciously.

I began acting in middle school. I enjoyed crafting characters and pretending for brief moments to be someone else entirely. It was another form of storytelling. 

I’ve always written things, from school essays to the lyrics for rock songs, but I didn’t get into it seriously until a couple years after graduating as an actor from Helsinki’s Theatre Academy. There was a time when I found myself “in between jobs”, something most freelancers are all too familiar with. I realized that it gave me time to do something I had been dreaming about, so I sat down and began thinking about the kind of book I would like to read myself at that very moment. And with that, the detective novel Pudotus (published by Gummerus in 2008), was born. 

In addition to novels, these days I also write screenplays, and a couple of my stage plays have seen the light of day, too.

When I have some free time I do running, and I have always kept music with me. I play the guitar and sing and my band, Vaeltajat (The Wanderers, in English) plays some gigs time to time. 

Make sure to say hello when we meet!

ML.