English singer PJ Harvey will read her poetry at the Prima Vista Literary Festival

The internationally renowned singer, songwriter, and author PJ Harvey is coming to Tartu, Estonia as part of the Prima Vista literary festival for a special spoken-word event on May 9 at 6 PM at the Athena Centre.

In this non-music event, PJ Harvey will recite poems from her latest book Orlam and join in conversation with Mari Kalkun. Orlam reveals PJ Harvey as a gifted poet whose formal skill, transforming eye and ear for the lyric line has produced a strange and moving poem like no other. Orlam is not only a remarkable coming-of-age tale, but the first full-length book written in the Dorset dialect for many decades.

PJ Harvey’s career has always commanded attention. A multi-instrumentalist, she is primarily a vocalist, guitarist and pianist. Her catalogue features ten studio albums, her most recent being 2023’s Grammy-nominated I Inside the Old Year Dying. Musicians she has collaborated with include Thom Yorke, Nick Cave, Tricky, Sparklehorse, Josh Homme, John Parish, Pascal Comelade, Gordon Gano, Ramy Essam and Mark Lanegan.

Accolades include an MBE for services to music and an Honorary Degree in Music at Goldsmiths. She is the only artist to have been awarded the Mercury Music Prize twice, in 2001 for Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, and 2011 for Let England Shake, alongside eight Brit Award nominations, eight Grammy Award nominations and two further Mercury Prize nominations. She has authored two books of poetry, The Hollow of the Hand and Orlam.

“The wider public probably knows PJ Harvey more as a singer, musician and songwriter,“ says festival organizer Jaak Tomberg. „But she is also an incredibly talented poet, whose recent poem “Orlam”, written in the Dorset dialect, is very attentive to the singularity and history of a specific place, and therefore fits very well with Prima Vista’s this year’s theme of “Book as Place, Place as Book”.

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