Kari Klemelä

Kari Klemelä (b. 1955 in Koski, Finland) has been translating literature for 30 years, first from Russian, and starting from 1997 also from South Slavonic languages. His own publishing house, Mansarda, has published literature in several genres, ranging from poetry to academic studies. He has translated books about Jews in Russia and three novels from ex-Yugoslavian Danilo Kiš and one from David Albahari, Goce Smilevski and Igor Štiks – all writers with Jewish background or Jewish thematics. This autumn Mansarda published Sami Michael's Nabila.
In 1999, Klemelä founded the Slovenian Society in Finland. He is also a photographer, and makes the cover art for the books he publishes. He lives part of the year in Izola, Slovenia. He has been awarded several prizes in Finland and the Pretnar Prize in Slovenia.
As a genealogist he has found out that his maternal line is distantly Sephardic-Iberian.