Award helps Eve Pormeister claim a place in Estonian literary life

Literary researcher Eve Pormeister said a cultural award has helped her feel that she belongs in Estonia’s literary community, after years of seeing herself as an outsider. She spoke on ERR’s cultural programme Delta after receiving this year’s Ene Mihkelson cultural interpreter award.

Pormeister said the recognition took her by surprise, particularly as she had also been nominated for the award the previous year. She recalled trying to stay calm at the October 23 ceremony, but said her heart began beating hard as the moment to announce the winner approached.

She said she had entered Estonia’s literary scene late and had worked in the field for only about 10 years. Among literary figures and researchers, she sometimes felt like an outsider and, at times, a naive writer, partly because of her distinctive use of language. Moving between Estonian and German had sometimes caused confusion, she said, though she had also enjoyed it.

Pormeister studied in the mathematics and physics class at Lydia Koidula Secondary School. She began learning German because she hoped to travel to Australia to visit her great-aunt, and later enrolled at the University of Tartu before continuing her studies at Leipzig University, in its German studies programme for international students. Her first major research project focused on German-language literature from Switzerland, which she said felt closer to her than Estonian literature at the time.

She began working more intensively in Estonian in 2016. Pormeister said that responses from writers and comments made by Marju Lauristin at Ene Mihkelson Day had encouraged her to believe that she had a place in Estonian literary life. In recent years, she has regarded her work illuminating Estonian writers’ books as a mission. She said she sees her approach, which Maarja Vaino has described as intuitive literary scholarship, as a natural way of engaging with literature.