Mika Waltari was a Finnish novelist, playwright, poet, journalist, screenwriter, and translator whose literary output spanned several decades of the twentieth century.

Born in Helsinki on 19 September 1908, Waltari was educated at the Helsinki Normal Lyceum before continuing his studies at the University of Helsinki. He worked in both Finnish and Swedish, and his career encompassed an unusually broad range of forms — from fiction and drama to journalism and translation. That breadth of engagement across different modes of writing marked his professional life from an early stage.

Over the course of his career, Waltari received a number of formal recognitions. He was awarded the Pro Finlandia Medal of the Order of the Lion of Finland, as well as the Commander First Class of the same order. The University of Turku conferred upon him an honorary doctorate, and he received the Aleksis Kivi Award, one of the significant literary distinctions in Finland. His work in screenwriting was also acknowledged with a Jussi Award for Best Script, reflecting the range of media in which he operated.

Waltari worked primarily in the genres of historical prose literature and crime literature — two modes that together account for much of his fictional output. Historical prose allowed him to set human experience against the sweep of earlier civilizations, while crime literature gave his storytelling a more concentrated, present-tense tension. He died in Helsinki on 26 August 1979, the same city in which he had been born seventy years earlier. His Library of Congress entry records him simply as Waltari, Mika, 1908–1979 — a span that brackets a long and varied engagement with Finnish letters, carried out in two languages and across forms ranging from the lyric poem to the screenplay. The pairing of historical and crime fiction remains the clearest marker of the imaginative territory he occupied.