Tuomas Kyrö wrote about a Ukrainian frontline soldier – “I really wasn’t in my comfort zone”

When Tuomas Kyrö turned ten, he got a bicycle and a soccer ball for his birthday.

On the twentieth anniversary, a graduation cap was placed on the head.

Ten years later, Kyrö’s family had a firstborn and a half-year-old baby took all the attention. The author of his forties and now approaching fifties acknowledges one thing – “that’s where they are”.

“I have never thought about my life in terms of my age. That tenth anniversary was the hardest. It was the summer of 1984, it was the European football championships, the star of which was Michael Platini.”

The writer’s childhood in Helsinki’s Puistola was a combination of sociability, active games in the private area such as climbing trees, and as a counterbalance lonely concentration, drawing in one’s own circumstances.

The same formula continues in Kyrö’s work even today. In his office in Töölö, he writes alone for about four hours a day. During that time, among other things, scripts for television panel programs are created, the creation of which brings social variety to everyday life.

For Kyrö, writing is above all play. That doesn’t mean that you can’t deal with serious issues in the texts.

Presently Kyrö is writing a new novel and a play Mind blowingseries.

In the upcoming book, the fur-hatted cuckoo from a disappearing world has to face the takeover attempts of a foreign mining company on his own lands. In the play, the same man ends up fighting for a nursing home that is to be abolished.

Kyrö deepens the treatment of serious and topical issues with lightening humor, like, for example Gösta Sundqvist In the lyrics of Leevi & The Leavings at the time.

Tragicomedy is thousands of years old, because life is like that, says Kyrö.

“I don’t know if you can choose to look at the world through sunny or darkening lenses. I myself have rather laughed than cried. However, perhaps the best reward in this work is if you make the reader both laugh and cry.”

“This leads to my thoughts on life: it’s not always easy or nice. But what if it was? So what would we be? of Robert Helenius the coach said, ‘Shit makes flowers grow.'”

Boxer Helenius and Alexi Lysander Kyrö’s previous books were the biographies of a Finnish professional soldier with the name -.

Both were published last year and took the Helsinki-based writer to places and situations he didn’t think he would go to. While getting to know Helenius and the world of professional boxing, Kyrö sat in a bar in Brooklyn, New York with boxers, boxing coaches and managers.

Less than a couple of years ago, Kyrö, on the other hand, traveled to Kyiv. A few months had passed since the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine.

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“Perhaps the best reward in this job is if you make the reader both laugh and cry.”

Aleksi from Finland – book tells how the son of a Finnish mother and a Senegalese father, Aleksi, was bullied at school, and how he joined the Foreign Legion at the age of 18. There has been enough fighting since then. Kyrö observed that people like Aleksi, who feel that they have nothing to lose, are fighting on the front lines of the world’s crisis centers.

The familiar remedy, i.e. humor, did not fit Aleksi from Finland to the work.

“I really wasn’t in my comfort zone,” says Kyrö.

Comfort zone found in the world of imagination. Imagination, on the other hand, is built from memories, everything you read and you know where Seinfeldin from the viewpoints adopted from TV series like this, from extremes and, of course, from everyday observations that can be appropriately colored.

Kyrö returns to the idea of ​​play, and remembers how as a child he dressed in tights, put a scarf around his neck and a wooden stick around his waist.

And whatever Mind blowing is suspicious of modern times, its author is confident: today’s children are exactly the same as their imaginary world. They are, even though previous generations tend to worry about what children and young people are excited about.

“Our generation was supposed to be destroyed because of cartoons! When we went to the library with the school, we were told not to go to the comics shelf!”

About mind blowing has become one of the biggest literary phenomena of the 21st century. Initially, Kyrö wrote them as five-minute radio broadcasts, until he decided to publish them as books as well.

“I had learned from a colleague that the best text is one that can be sold twice.”

Mind blowing (2010) started the series and sold well. Well over 100,000 copies were sold during the first years. Since then, the man in the fur cap has been turned into films and plays, and the books in the series have been translated into ten languages.

“Applying for grants is more difficult than writing books. If the books produce so much that you don’t need to apply for grants, that’s liberating. Money doesn’t bring happiness, but it can bring freedom.”

And freedom brings the opportunity to play.

What would you like to say to your 20-year-old self?

“Don’t drink that neighbor’s beer.”