Lehtolainen, Leena

Leena Katriina Lehtolainen is a Finnish author. She was born in Vesanto and grew up in Outokumpu, Northern Karelia. Lehtolainen’s parents were both university lecturers. She obtained a licentiate degree from the University of Helsinki with a thesis on the subject of the Finnish crime novelist Eeva Tenhunen. She was an assistant and lecturer at the department of Finnish literature at the University of Helsinki in 1990–91, and she was previously a critic and columnist. She was elected to the board of the Scandinavian Society of Crime Writers in 1998. She wrote her first book, Ja äkkiä onkin toukokuu (1976) at the age of twelve, and five years later she published another young adult novel.