Thanks to the University of Helsinki I got to study in Paris, one of the first to be offered an Erasmus student exchange. I had earlier spent a year travelling around France doing voluntary work, to the point where the French lifestyle had become thoroughly familiar. My year spent at the Sorbonne was valuable in terms of working life, literary studies and my choices in life. In the end I wrote my Master’s dissertation on the French historical novelist and académicienne Marguerite Yourcenar. Working at a publishers I have been happy to have been given the chance to make contemporary French literature better known in Finland.

France became a part of me. At present I am chairperson of the foundation board for the Finnish Institute in Paris, and I get to help generate a more interesting impression of Finland. The institute, which is just across the road from the Sorbonne, is the place for offering up Finnish design, techno music, industrial design as well as food and urban culture alongside high culture, science and the arts. The Finnish brand lives, as does the concept of culture. But there’s not a stuffed shirt in sight, as the piece in the newspaper has it.

• Otto Talvio ”Instituutissa ei pönötetä” (’no stuffed shirts in the Institute’), Helsingin Sanomat newspaper, April 25, 2015. Accessed April 30, 2015. (In Finnish)