Once in a while Karo Hämäläinen receives a phone call which begins with the caller asking whether this is the journalist who writes about the stock market “because there is also a novelist of the same name.” Mr Hämäläinen replies that the call has reached the right person, the same reply he gives to callers to the novelist who mention his investment specialist namesake.

As a writer, Karo Hämäläinen likes to experiment. He wasn’t the kind of boy who dismantled radios to see how they worked, but from an early age he took short stories and novels to pieces in order to see how words created feelings, thoughts and illusions.

The views of a literary critic come to the fore when the reading public jointly defines what constitutes good literature. As the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Parnasso, Karo Hämäläinen leads Finland’s most prestigious literary magazine, and as such is a key figure for budding authors.

Architecture has always had a big effect on my mood. The old part of the University’s main building had just been renovated when I began studying. I stared in speechless admiration at the tall ceilings and the statues lining the corridors.