The house
Growing Up Nordic is an independent children's publishing house based in Finland.
We release a small number of books each year, on the rhythm of the seasons. Each book is made to be kept. Hardcover picture books and seasonal PlayBooks for children aged three to seven.
What Nordic means here
Nordic is a way of marking the year.
The Finnish calendar holds eight seasons, not four. Early spring, spring, early summer, high summer, late summer, autumn, winter, and the dark before the light returns. Our books follow this finer calendar.
Allemansrätten, the right to roam, treats the forest as common ground. Children belong outside. Nature is not a destination; it is the floor.
The mökki rhythm shapes how we think about childhood time. Long pauses between activities, quiet weeks, sauna, berries, and boredom that turns into imagination.
Lagom and sisu, just enough and quiet endurance, shape how we think about the books themselves. Restraint as a form of care.
And the long darkness is part of the world we write. Winter, indoor light, candlelight, stillness. We do not pretend childhood is only sunlit.
What we publish
Hardcover picture books for the family library. Seasonal PlayBooks, companions for the year that hold crafts, recipes, and small invitations to notice. Stories for slow moments and bedtime hours. Books printed on tactile paper, bound to lie flat, made to be passed from one child to the next.
Authors
D.I. Suikkanen
D.I. Suikkanen writes from Finland, where the winters are long, and the light is worth waiting for. Her stories follow the quiet hours of childhood: the walk home, the held breath, the things a forest teaches. She believes the best hour of any day is the one nobody hurries.
Aino M. Ketola
Aino M. Ketola lives in the Finnish countryside, where the summers are green and the winters are blue. She writes the kind of stories that get demanded twice at bedtime. She believes every puddle is an ocean, every pocket should be full of stones, and every sauna has room for a moose.
The long view
We are not in a hurry. The catalogue grows slowly. Books return with their seasons. Readers find us when the time is right.
Letters from the North, our quiet newsletter, arrives when there is something worth saying.