Raffaella Silvestri — an author from Milano in her thirties, woke up to the difference of European cultures on her Erasmus-year in Finland. She took part in the Masterpiece competition, a TV program that seeks writer talents on RAI. Competitors had to write different genres from fiction to tweets.
Her story of “La distanza da Helsinki” became one of the finalists but didn’t win the competition. Instead a big publisher company “Bompiani” became exited from the young authors text. The book was published in May of 2015 and already more is expected from Raffaella.
The book represents a modern way of story telling and was first presented to the Finnish public at the Book fair of Helsinki on October 2014. The teenage main characters of the story, Italian Viola and Finnish Kimi are in a typical situation amongst many European youngsters — on a language course in England. Observations and the story around them take place in modern times, a seemingly easy international atmosphere, where big culture differences surface and become the story itself.
Raffaella Silvestri has many thoughts and being European and how different generations built the concept in different ways. In her own Erasmus-generation, those born in the 80s, it has already been considered normal to spend a longer period of one’s life abroad.
The year in Finland had been conclusive for Raffaella. She felt growing as a person, having found something totally new to her life. As she calls it “Il paese che mi ha cambiata”, the country that changed her.
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