Becoming an editor at the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper was everything but a matter of course for me. I looked for a job as a porter at Sanoma in the start of 1989 because I was a 29-year-old father of a family and I had run out of money. In September of that year I started working as a journalist at Sanoma’s internal staff newsletter Hesa. When the editor-in-chief of the paper retired a couple of years later, I was the only editor at the paper and the acting editor-in-chief at that time. So in a matter of three years I had moved up – or gone down – from being a porter at the paper’s building to being the paper’s editor-in-chief. In 1993 I started as an editor for Helsingin Sanomat’s culture desk.

After having written pieces for the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper for 25 years, the last few with my face in the articles, it is not possible to avoid being known to the public. My journalism colleague Vesa Sirén once noted that in order to create a brand, it is enough to just repeat yourself over and over again. I thought that was funny and aptly spoken. I became known in the 1990s for dealing with urban culture stories because I churned them out all the time when I was on the cultural affairs desk. In the years 2002–06, I was known as a journalist of the Helsinki, Espoo and Vantaa municipalities, and then I became known to the capital’s politicians, officials and those types of people.

Starting in 1997 as a city journalist, I wrote from many different angles about marginalized people, such as the homeless, alcoholics, mental patients and institutionalised senior citizens. I guess these subjects were imprinted on me in my youth from my grandparents and possibly later from my studies in world literature.

My grandfather and grandmother were early social democrats and Christians. My grandfather built schools, bought the first radio in his town and read a lot. My grandmother taught Sunday school, raised money for the poor in Africa, gave to beggars and made sahti beer for celebrations. I tell these stories in my book Kasvonsa menettänyt mies (‘The man who lost his face’), which was published in the spring of 2015. My father, for his part, went bankrupt with five lorries when I was five. The lorries went, the house went, everything went. This trauma has presumably guided my writing.

How this leads to world literature is that one girl got me books from the library when I was young. Then I read the classics at the university. In the classics they are on the side of the small and the good. I am trying to be. I probably became best known for my stories about Romani beggars in the Helsingin Samonat newspaper.

Then in 2008 when I got a viral and bacterial infection which destroyed my face, I became known for my appearance. I wrote a book on that too. It is remarkable what life will bring. Unlike my children perhaps, I am thankful that I did not become an entrepreneur who chases money. I can’t keep up. But I do not want to lose, either. I will try to win at billiards, as hard as it always is. My mother and father made me, that much I know. The rest I’ve had to figure out on my own.