Matilda Kirvelä is a poet from Turku and a doctoral researcher in Finnish literature. She writes about language, tensions between people, and the body and mind from feminist and posthumanist perspectives, using her cynical charisma in her stage presence. Kirvelä won the prestigious and long-established J. H. Erkko writing competition in 2025 with her poetry sequence Se ei viittaa mihinkään tarkkaan (”It Refers to Nothing in Particular”), whose poetics the jury described as a poetry of intellect in which emotion shimmers alongside the corporeality of street poetry with its cigarettes and bodily fluids. Yksityiskohdattomuuksia (“Without Details” Kaarna Kustannus, 2026) is a collection in which the award-winning poet examines the complex rhizomatic entanglements of human relationships, society, and nature both brutally and passionately in a form that moves between the lyrical and the essayistic way of saying.
