[2] Kilpi was born and brought up in Kustavi, in Finland's western archipelago, and attended a private Finnish-language grammar school in Turku.

That same year he also published a collection of incidental pieces, including an effusive celebration of Aleksis Kivi, titled Ihmisestä ja elämästä: Kirjoitelmia (Of Man and Life: Writings).

[3] Alastalon salissa is a 900-page two-volume novel whose time-span covers a mere six hours of an October Thursday in 1866, and whose setting is the roughly fifty square meters of the Alastalo parlor, as the richest men in Kustavi haggle over investing in the building of a barque.

[1] The second and third volumes of the Archipelago series, Pitäjän pienempiä (The County's Littler Ones, short stories) and Kirkolle (To the Church Village, a novel), appeared in 1934 and 1937; they were followed by the collection of "swelling prose" Suljetuilla porteilla (At Closed Gates) in 1938.

In 1938 he also began his final novel, Gulliverin matka Fantomimian mantereelle, translated by Douglas Robinson as Gulliver's Voyage to Phantomimia; it remained unfinished at his death in Turku, and was published posthumously by his literary executor in 1944.