Mika Waltari (19.9.1908 – 26.8.1979) was a writer and member of the Finnish Academy.

Mika Waltari’s extensive oeuvre includes many best-sellers. His novels won first a Finnish and then, at the end of the 1940s, an international audience.

Waltari was as at home writing about the grand themes of world history as about city dwellers of his own period; brick novels, novellas, detective stories, stage plays, screenplays and comic strips. His work exhibits a serious search for religion but also a permissive and joyful worldliness.

A precocious Waltari frequented the Tulenkantajat (The Flame Bearers) circles already while still at school where he got to know the contemporary Finnish writers. His breakthrough and first novel was The Great Illusion (1928) but this was actually his fifth published work. He had already published religious poems, horror novellas and together with Olavi Paavolainen a Flame Bearer-inspired collection of poems entitled Valtatiet (Highways). The Great Illusion was a critical, sales and translation success. It has been compared with descriptive works by Ernest Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald from the 1920s.

Following the Second World War, Sinuhe, The Egyptian (1945) was published, his novel set in ancient Egypt. This became an international success as well as his best-known work. After Sinuhe Waltari wrote several historical novels such as Mikael Karvajalka (1948), Mikael Hakim (1949) as well as Valtakunnan salaisuus (The Secret of the Kingdom,1959) and Ihmiskunnan viholliset (The Enemies of Humanity, 1964) about the early years of the Christian faith.

A total of 33 films have been made from Waltari’s works of which the most well known are the highly popular Inspector Palmu series of films directed by Matti Kassila.

After 1964 Waltari’s inspiration dried up. He attempted to write one more historical novel about the knights of Malta but it remained unfinished.

In his final years he enjoyed a respect which had been denied him during his active years as he had been considered then to be merely a lightweight author.