Timo Kustaa Mukka (17 December 1944 – 27 March 1973) was a Finnish author who wrote about the lives of people in Lapland. Early life Timo Mukka was born in Bollnäs in Sweden where his family had been evacuated to during the Lapland War. He spent his childhood in the village of Orajärvi in the Pello municipality in northern Finland. The village had a strong presence of both Laestadianist Christians and communists, which affected the development of Mukka's worldview. At the age of thirteen, he contracted meningitis and although he survived the illness, he suffered from severe headaches for the next four years. During that time his personality changed radically and he even attempted to commit suicide. An early influence on Mukka's writing was L.M. Montgomery's Emily of New Moon. He instantly related with the girl from a poor background, who wanted nothing but to write, and so set out to become a writer himself. He sent his first story to a publisher when he was thirteen. Although it was rejected he continued to send stories and poems to the publishing executive of the Karisto publishing house, Martti Qvist, always with a note saying that the writings should be burnt if they were not accepted. Martti Qvist had stopped replying to Mukka's subscriptions in early 1960, so when he wrote his first novel later that year he sent it to the Gummerus publishing house instead. Gummerus did not accept the novel, which was a profound disappointment for the young writer and caused him to doubt whether he was supposed to be a writer after all. In the autumn of 1961 at the age of seventeen Mukka moved to Helsinki to study at the Academy of Fine Arts to become a painter. He was youngest student ever to enroll at the school. His studies did not last long though as he dropped out the following spring, but during his time there he met his future wife Tuula Pekkola. Of his time at the school he wrote: "I did not like the method, not the teachers, nothing. And this one year killed my painting habit so completely that I have not picked up a brush since." Later that year, on June 5, Mukka's father died. The loss had a long-standing effect on the writer and is evident in many of his works. The latter half of 1962 he worked at various jobs,