Imagine Finland – a small nation, less than a hundred years old, on the northeastern outskirts of Europe. A country where national identity is built on an eccentric mixture of celebratory discourses: its education system, its engineers (behind the Nokia wonder), its heroes of the Second World War, its world champions in ice hockey, and an innate perseverance that allows its people to survive where others might not. This is a place where education – at all levels – is free for everyone, where people's general level of education is high, where the public-library network is well maintained, and where expert knowledge is trusted, although by a people educated enough to think they probably know better. Finland: the exemplary Nordic nation where women got the vote in 1906 – the first in Europe, a nation that features high in international gender equality comparison studies. Yet Finland is also a place where the number of women reporting domestic violence is amongst the highest in the European Union and where gender segregation in working life has become more – rather than less – pronounced during the last decade. A country where silence is golden and where dressing sensibly is the norm. Where everything too stylish, glamorous, sweet, joyful, or queer is Swedish and thus suspicious and where everything too tacky, cheap, sour, melancholic, or homophobic is either Russian or Estonian and thus equally suspicious.

Enter a young Finnish-Estonian female author who wears feminine, glamorous Gothic outfits, states openly that she is bisexual, writes both bestselling and critically acclaimed novels that also turn out to be successful abroad, and eagerly shares her opinions in public discussions about the history and current political situation in Estonia and Russia, freedom of expression and censorship, gendered violence, and the rights of women and sexual minorities in Finland and elsewhere. The foregoing all work together to guarantee much attention from both the Finnish media, and Finnish audiences.

In Finland the roles of literary author, celebrity, and public intellectual are rarely combined. Celebrity status is seen as a threat to the seriousness of the author and their work, whilst the role of public intellectual is considered too challenging for a literary author who does not have the competence (i.e. expert education) to give general comments about societal issues.