CARITA FORSGREN

Carita Forsgren was born 1968 in Tampere, Finland, where she still lives with her husband Mikko and their three sons who are not quite teenagers yet. Carita studied architecture for two years at the Tampere University of Technology, but switched to study communication and graphic design at the University of Essen, Germany.

German being by chance her second mother tongue, it was relatively easy for Carita to live and study in Germany.

Carita went to the Helsinki University of Applied Arts for a year as an exchange student, and it was there that she got interested and involved in new media, or multimedia, as it was then called. In Helsinki she got the idea of creating an edutainment game about astronomy as her final work in graphic design & animation. With this game demo – called Welt-Traum – she got her Masters of Art degree in Essen at the end of 1994.

After getting her MA, Carita moved back to Finland and got a job as a full-time teacher at the Tampere School of Art and Media, giving courses on new media to people who were scarcely any younger than herself. After four years of teaching, she decided it was time to start her own media and design company. This she did in 1999, and the company – called KAA Productions – is still operating.

All her life, Carita has been creating and writing stories. Over the years, she sent some of her short stories and movie scripts to various Finnish competitions. Seven of her science fiction short stories have been awarded and published in Finnish sci-fi magazines.

In 2000, Carita sent a script to enter a competition hosted by the Finnish Science Centre Heureka. Her script won, and her company also became co-producer of the show that was made for the Centre’s planetarium theatre. The show ran for one year at the science centre. That year, (2001) Carita also gave birth to twin babies, which made her life kind of busy for a couple of years.

Around 2005, (after having one additional child in 2003) Carita started teaching again as a part-time teacher at the International Media Programme of the Tampere University for Applied Sciences. She also took up writing again, and also continued creating new media concepts. One of these concepts – called Arkki – was produced by the Finnish Broadcasting Company as a web series for pre-teens. One other concept of hers also got nominated at the Content360 competition at MIPTV, Cannes in 2007, by the BBC.

After 2007, Carita was busy teaching, writing scripts for movies and television series that didn’t get produced, and interestingly, editing concept bibles for several reality shows produced by Aito Media Ltd., a Finnish media company. She also got writing credits for an animated series about Santa’s little helpers called Red Caps, produced by Epidem Ltd.

It was the seasoned producer of Epidem, Mikael Wahlforss, who asked Carita if she had ever thought of writing novels out of her television and movie concepts. Carita agreed that it was a good idea, attended a course for writing novels, and sent her manuscript to Otava Publishing, one of the major book publishers in Finland. The editor Lotta Sonninen at Otava liked the manuscript, and a deal was made. When Carita’s debut novel was published in 2009, it became a best-seller for three months, which was a nice coincidence, since the book was called “Queen of Three Moons/Months.“

Carita has published four novels for Otava and is currently writing her fifth, while working as a senior lecturer of visual design at the Tampere University of Applied Sciences, and continuing to edit reality show concept bibles every once in a while.