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Kairi Look’s first children’s book, Ville the Lemur Flies the Coop, was published in 2012. The author herself could very well be that lemu...
Portraits
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Sanna Kartau (b. 1993) is an Estonian poet and journalist whose debut collection I Vote for This War With My Body won the 2022 Betti Alver...
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Pâté of the Apes by Tõnis Tootsen (b. 1988) is the story of Ergo, the first ape who has learned to write. As the title suggests, the s...
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Tõnis Vilu is one of the most outstanding and significant Estonian poets today. He has published eight[1] works in less than a decade, ...
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In 2007, Martin Algus had a dual victory: his problem play Janu (Thirst) and youth play Ise oled! (You Are!) received first and second plac...
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When Juhani Püttsepp published his first children’s book in 1994, Johannes the Artist’s Strange Stories, critics didn’t quite know what to ...
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Martin Algus (b. 1973) is known foremost as an actor, dramatist, and screenwriter. He has authored award-winning plays for over a decade an...
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Joonas Sildre’s graphic novel Between Two Sounds: Arvo Pärt’s Journey to His Musical Language was published in Estonian in the autumn of 20...
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Novels, novellas, plays, opinion pieces, and radio programs – Andrus Kivirähk is so active in so many different creative fields that it is ...
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When Estonia gained independence in 1918, one of the first tasks of the new state was to tell the rest of the world that it exists. Diploma...
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Andres Allan Ellmann (1964-1988) was one of the very few mystical poets in post-war Estonian poetry. I think it was in his blood – his moth...
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Anti Saar (1980) is one of the most interesting and distinctive members of the younger generation of Estonian children’s writers. After gra...
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The year 2019 looms large in Estonia’s cultural calendar, marking the 150th anniversary of the Estonian Song and Dance Celebration. Its imp...
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Birgita Bonde Hansen has translated eight books from Estonian and over forty from Finnish into her native Danish. Her dedicated work has no...
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Jaan Kross first came to prominence in the English-speaking world in 1992 with the publication of The Czar’s Madman (Keisri Hull), translat...
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Not everyone can sufficiently appreciate literary competitions and their effect on the rise of future writers. Such contests are often seen...
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Once, a mistake was made, and the mistake was violenceEven afterward, people were born (poor ones?)who adapted to the mistake and lived inn...
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Eduard Vilde (1865-1933) was the first Estonian prose writer to achieve classic status, and he has thereby come to be regarded as the most ...
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Clouds have meaning. The meaning is indistinct and floating, but is simultaneously constant and incessantly turning back. We cannot imagine ...
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A woman furtively squeezes the rounded surfaces of hard, unripe pears in her purse: she must somehow change the mind of a man who is threate...
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The Estonian writer and politician Maimu Berg (71) mesmerizes readers with her audacity in directly addressing some topics that are even see...
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Siuru, a literary group of the utmost importance in Estonia’s cultural context, was founded in May 1917. It was the second-to-last year of W...
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How can one explain Nikolai Baturin’s works and creative identity to someone from a different and distant culture, when they are quite the m...
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I last saw Paavo Matsin (1970) at a museum that honors the Estonian literary classic Eduard Vilde, where we were both scheduled to speak. We...
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I’ll start with children’s own assessment. Together with third-grade students, we drafted a list of important public figures in Estonia base...
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Just about a year ago, Jüri Kolk, Jan Kaus, Karl Martin Sinijärv, and I were reading our own works and a pinch of others’ to a nearly full h...
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Besides being born a poet, one can also grow into a poet. One can develop into a poet on the basis of life experience and the heritage of ot...
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In his short discourse titled Literature, Jaan Kaplinski wrote about an uncertainty of his, about his years-long wait for his prose to ‘sta...
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Late one Saturday afternoon in September 2006 I sent my translations of 28 poems by Kristiina Ehin to Oleander Press in Cambridge, England ...
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Hasso Krull is a winter poet. I’m not saying this merely out of opportunism – his latest and much acclaimed collection of poetry (2006) was...
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Mats Traat can be regarded as a panoramic describer of Estonian history, as well as a researcher of the Estonian soul. Having started as a ...
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Viivi Luik is one of the most treasured writers of contemporary Estonian literature. With her poetry, she addresses readers of her own moth...
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Many processes, phenomena and events that took place in the former communist empire called the Soviet Union, have remained mysterious, illo...
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On 23 November 2006, one hundred years will have passed since the birth of Betti Alver, one of the most remarkable of all Estonian poets. W...
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The two laureates of the last annual poetry award both entered literature in the late 1990s; like Kristiina Ehin, Jürgen Rooste published h...
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Paul-Eerik Rummo, one of the major authors of the Estonian poetry innovation of the 1960s, was born in 1942 in Tallinn to the family of wr...
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During his lifetime, the prose-writer, poet and critic Jaan Oks published his articles and short stories in newspapers and various alma...
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Arvo Valton (1935) began his career as a writer in the 1960s. He is still a productive writer today and has been translated into many langu...
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fs is currently the shortest writer’s name in Estonia, used by Indrek Mesikepp (b. 1971), who graduated from Tartu University in 1999 as an...
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Elo Viiding is one of the most distinguished Estonian poets, not only currently but also in terms of the history of Estonian literature. Sh...
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Reading reference works about Ilmar Talve, we learn that he is a Finnish ethnologist of international renown, an honorary member of scienti...
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Albert Kivikas (1898-1978) had three quite distinct roles in Estonian literary history. I will examine them in chronological order. Kivikas...
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Aidi Vallik, author of several collections of poetry, has talked a few times about how she came to write books for young people.As a teache...
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On the bicentenary of birth of Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald,the author of Kalevipoeg and the founder of Estonian literatureFriedrich Reinh...
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This spring saw the publication of poetry collections by mother and daughter, almost at the same time – Ly Seppel’s Sparkle of Time (Ajasär...
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Born on 30 November 1883 in Võnnu, in southern Estonia, into the family of a village teacher, Suits came to Tartu in 1895 and began his st...
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Autumn 1944 started the diaspora of Baltic peoples; exile scattered Estonian literature all over the world. Until that time, Estonian lite...
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The name Rein Sepp (1921-1995) in Estonian culture is above all associated with translations of a number of imposing works of literature. P...
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Jüri Ehlvest is one of the most original Estonian prose authors of the 1990s, and also most difficult to interpret. The critics have been i...
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The marriage of Aino and Oskar Kallas – a Finnish bridge in reality1. RomanceOne of the brightest and most diverse eras in Estonia’s his...
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In the beginning there was a myth.And the myth was split into arts, sciences, philosophy and religion; into the common and the sublime; int...
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The tragic Estonian poet, Juhan Liiv, who lived on the knife-edge between genius and insanity, lived at the turn of the 19th and 20th centu...
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Madis Kõiv (born in 1929) is a remarkably versatile man: a nuclear physicist by profession, he chairs the seminar of analytical philosophy ...
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Ilmar Laaban, often called the father of Estonian Surrealism, was born on 17 November 1921 in Tallinn. Between 1939 and 1940 and again in 1...
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Ervin Õunapuu (born in 1956) is a Renaissance man by nature, both in life and in his work. It would be a hard task to enumerate everything...