125th Birthday of Frans Eemil Sillanpää

A portrait of Sillanpää. Along the upper rim the name "F. E. SILLANPÄÄ" arcs in a semicircle. On the left: the birth year "1888" and the mint mark. On the right: the death year "1964", the country name "FI", and the year of issue "2013".

Frans Eemil Sillanpää was born in 1888 in Hämeenkyrö in rural Finland, the son of a smallholder family. He studied natural sciences in Helsinki but turned to literature early on. His writing is deeply rooted in the Finnish landscape and the social tensions of his time: the world of the impoverished rural population, the conflict between old ties and modern change, and the relationship between people and nature run through his entire body of work. Sillanpää became internationally known above all for the novel "Meek Heritage" (Finnish: "Hurskas kurjuus", 1919), published shortly after the Finnish Civil War, which portrays its traumas from the perspective of an ordinary man. His style is considered lyrically realistic, shaped by a biologistic worldview he had acquired during his scientific training.

In 1939, Frans Eemil Sillanpää became the first Finn awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature — for "his deep understanding of his country's peasantry and the exquisite art with which he has portrayed their way of life and their relationship with Nature", as the Swedish Academy put it. This placed Finland in the international literary spotlight for the first time, and he was henceforth regarded in his homeland as the national poet. He died in 1964 in Helsinki. In 2013, Finland commemorated the 125th anniversary of Sillanpää's birth with a 2-euro commemorative coin, honouring a writer whose work captures early-20th-century Finnish identity like almost no other.