Mehis Heinsaar (Estonia)
Mehis Heinsaar, born in 1973, is a celebrated Estonian writer and the patron of the 2023 Prima Vista literary festival. He first made a name for himself as a poet, affiliated with the renowned literary group Erakkond (The Group of Hermits), back in 1997. However, it was his collection of short stories, “Vanameeste näppaja” (Snatcher of Old Men), published in 2001, that truly brought him widespread recognition. Heinsaar’s remarkable talent has been acknowledged with numerous prestigious awards, and his works have been translated into over 10 languages.
Heinsaar’s storytelling style, often characterized as magical realism, is both captivating and poetic. Readers are often taken by surprise at how seamlessly supernatural elements or characters are woven into the natural world in his narratives. In 2021, a film titled “The Gardener of Tension Fields,” directed by Joosep Matjus and Katri Rannastu, drew inspiration from Heinsaar’s poetry collection of the same name, which was published in 2018. More recently, Heinsaar’s latest novel, “Lost Tribe,” has received widespread acclaim, earning him the main award in literature from the Estonian Cultural Endowment, the first Estonian Literary Museum Friend’s Award, and the A. H. Tammsaare Literary Award.
Saturday, May 5th 18.00 at Paide Music and Theater House
Monday, May 8th 21.00 at the Embassy premises on the corner of Rüütli Street and Town Hall Square
Tuesday, May 9th 18.00 at the hall of Tartu Literature House
Wednesday, May 10th 18.00 at the Conference Hall of the University of Tartu Library
Saturday, May 13th 12 at Tartu Literary House
Clara Amaral (Portugal)
i’m not sure if it’s an impossible wish wish wish maybe i don’t like it when the word “wish” and “impossible” are together like close together i think i think some words shouldn’t be in proximity since it might disturb the order of things like what things what order oh just you know it might do a bad spell a spell of the baaaaaaaaaaaad d d d d and prevent happenings and turn stuff stuffy stuff being turned sometimes i listen to classical music and i thrive i thrive so much so so much i don’t know it’s weird i know it’s weird specially because it’s all this dead white men right right and i wish it wouldn’t be just those dead white men that wrote the classical classical music that i so much so much thrive on so YA maybe that is something i wish you see right there it just came out of me i literally didn’t even noticed it it was just when i was rereading what i wrote cause i do that that i saw that i said i wrote i wish if you know what i mean i think you do i hope you do i do you do so that’s that that
sometimes i also wish i could write different things you know things that would be open things closed things middle things high things the things i’ve been writing lately have to do with dance my grandma dance again alexander technique a girl having time’s back my great grandmother my mother hands with six fingers my mother i sometimes
Clara Amaral is an artist working with text and performance. Her interdisciplinary artistic practice questions what it means to be a reader, to be a writer, aiming to expand existing modes of reading, writing and publishing. Central to her practice is the investigation of publishing modalities and the performative aspect of writing and language, through an intersectional feminist approach.
Her works have been presented in The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Austria, Norway, Switzerland, France, etc.
Tuesday, May 9th 21.00 at the Embassy premises on the corner of Rüütli Street and Town Hall Square
Cloud Circuit – Deanna Radford & Jeremy Young (Canada)
Montréal poetrysound ensemble Cloud Circuit finds inspiration in communication glitches, broken speech, and contact lost. Cloud Circuit’s motors are the gray areas of connection, those lost threads, dropped signals, failures of technology, and outages at the edge of night. In performance, Cloud Circuit’s approach is collaborative and improvisational; its sound and words composed, dissected, and refracted. Deanna Radford channels her poetry as deconstructed word events, Jeremy Young plays sine tones in flux and amplified surfaces.
Early on, Cloud Circuit included members Alexandre St-Onge and Philippe Vandal. The group has performed in settings shaped by communities of sound, music, and literature; it has shared the stage with David Grubbs, Ora Clementi, Christopher Tignor, Flying Hórses, skintone, Alex Zhang Hungtai, Vito Ricci, Paul Dutton, Lea Bertucci, Sarah Pagé and Jonah Fortune, Jessica Ackerley, Eliza Kavtion, Michel Meunier, Ylang Ylang, Greg Davis, Khaleefa “Apollo the Child” Hamdan, Rasiqra Revulva, Jessica Pavone, and others.
~ME YOU THEY ~
It is a human invention, a story, a destination, something to strive for that we might
move through and be within. It is a process.
It is the dream of a lifetime. It is a dream. It is a lifetime. It is time.
It is work. It is not work. It is the jackpot. It is the impossible. It is the ordinary. It is the
extraordinary.
As a force, it is the hope for something better. For justice. For nirvana. For relief. For
pleasure. For harmony.
It is personal and it is shared.
Utopia
is we.
~Deanna Radford
Montreal, Montréal, Tiohtià:ke, Mooniyang
March 30, 2023
Saturday, May 5th 19.00 at Paide Music and Theater House
Saturday, May 13th 22.30 at the Tartu Literary House Culture Club Salong
Hans Platzgumer (Austria)
Hans Platzgumer is a writer, musician, and composer. He was born in 1969 in Innsbruck and currently lives between Bregenz and Vienna. He writes novels and essays and creates theatre and radio play music.
Having studied music in Vienna and Los Angeles, and lived in various parts of the world, Platzgumer has released dozens of albums and performed in thousands of concerts. He has written punk, rock, and electronic music for different ensembles, and his rock trio HP Zinker, formed in New York, was nominated for a Grammy in the 1990s. Platzgumer will bring his semi-acoustic indie rock band Convertible to Tartu.
After an international music career, Platzgumer’s creative focus has shifted to literature in recent decades. He has published 10 books to date, including a couple of essay collections and a book of song lyrics. His autobiographical debut novel about life as a musician, “Expedition,” was published in 2005, and “Elephantenfuss,” which takes place 25 years after the Chornobyl disaster in the surrounding death zone, gained wider attention when it was published in 2011. Platzgumer’s most successful novel, “Am Rand” (2016), nominated for the German Book Prize, has been translated into Estonian as “Serval.” An excerpt from his latest novel, “Bogners Abgang” (2021), can be read in the April issue of the Akadeemia magazine, translated by Piret Pääsuke.
As a novelist, Platzgumer is interested in extreme situations, the grey zone between life and death, and border situations that reveal the true nature of humanity. The overarching theme of his work is the ethics of human behaviour and choices, and the perception of responsibility. Platzgumer is not only a novelist but also a sensitive and critical essayist who analyzes contemporary society and cultural life. In the Embassy of Utopia at the festival, he will present his vision of a world that may still be impossible today. He describes it as follows: “My utopia, perhaps impossible, perhaps only becoming reality like a phoenix from the ashes, is humanity that can transcend the broadly destructive, self-destructive form of contemporary capitalist global order, and, contrary to short-sighted, selfish interests, can understand itself as part of nature.”
Tuesday, May 9th in Tallinn (Kadrioru Saksa Gümanaasium)
Thursday, May 11th 21.00 at the Embassy premises on the corner of Rüütli Street and Town Hall Square
Saturday, May 13th 20.00 at the Tartu Literary House Culture Club Salong
Maarja Pärtna (Estonia)
Maarja Pärtna is a writer, translator, and editor who focuses on socio-ecological themes in her work. She has published five poetry collections. Her spatial poetic collection “Vivarium”, published in 2019, combines historical trauma with climate anxiety and articulates a growing sense of risk perception in an apparently stable welfare society. Her prose poetry collection “Living City”, published in 2022, focuses on urban nature, the possibility of better coexistence with non-human animals, as well as lyrical childhood memories. These lead back to the traces of ecocide from Estonia’s oil shale industry, which is one of the local manifestations of the global ecological crisis.
Pärtna has studied English language and literature, as well as world literature, at the University of Tartu. As a translator, she has rendered essays by Kathleen Jamie, Margaret Atwood, Edward Said, and Robert Macfarlane into Estonian. She has worked as a literary editor for publications such as Müürileht and Värske Rõhk and has edited several poetry collections. Pärtna has been awarded the Gustav Suits Poetry Prize, Juhan Liiv Poetry Prize, and the title of Young Carrier of Culture of Tartu. Her poems have been translated into ten languages.
Pärtna’s impossible desire is to live in a world where protected areas are not necessary because we have learned to live in balance with nature. She explains: “We would then know other species and their needs well enough, and leave them enough space so that as many creatures as possible can survive the dangerous Anthropocene era. In such a world, human activity would fit within planetary boundaries. But unfortunately, even protected areas are not truly protected now, and resources such as timber and minerals are still extracted from there.”
Friday, May 12th 21.00 at the Embassy premises on the corner of Rüütli Street and Town Hall Square
Rimma Markova (Sweden)
Poet and prose writer, and member of the Swedish PEN Club, Rimma Markova was born in St. Petersburg in a family of geodesists. She graduated from the Pedagogical Institute with a degree in drawing and worked as a school teacher in the Murmansk Oblast for 12 years. Her first two poetry books were published there. Markova returned to St. Petersburg as a recognised poet but later emigrated to Sweden, where she has lived for over 20 years.
Rimma Markova’s poems have been translated into Swedish, English, Georgian, Bulgarian, and Chinese. This spring, her works were published in Estonian in the journal Looming, translated by Katrin Väli. Markova’s poetry is sincere, and simple, without embellishments or pathos, reminiscent of everyday speech. Each poem is strong due to its simplicity and honesty.
Markova is also known as a prose writer. Her novel “Stoltz” is about the relationship between a Swede named Stoltz and his Russian wife Olga. The book “The Black Viking”, which has been published in Sweden in Russian with a parallel translation in Swedish, is about the self-identification of a child from a mixed family: the teenage protagonist feels like a stranger both in Sweden, where he lives and in Russia, where his mother is from, as well as in his father’s home country of Somalia.
Markova has participated in numerous international poetry festivals and has been a laureate of prestigious cultural and literary awards. In 2011, Markova was awarded the “Public Educator of the Year” title in Sweden.
When asked, “What does the phrase ‘the impossible dream’ mean to you?”, Rimma Markova replied: “I wish to see Russia as a free democratic country. A country that is not a source of shame. Unfortunately, this wish is still impossible.”
Tuesday, May 9th 17.30 at the Conference Hall of the University of Tartu Library
Thursday, May 11th 14.30 at the Tartu City Museum
Friday, May 12th 15.30 at the Music Department of the University of Tartu Library
Lina Nordquist (Sweden)
Lina Nordquist (b. 1977) is a new fiction writer. Her debut novel, „Dit du går, följer jag,“ (2021), translated into Estonian by Tiina Mullamaa (“Järgnen sulle”, Eesti Raamat, 2022), tells a story of a family in the same house from the end of the 19th century to the 1970s.
We meet two narrators on two different timelines: Unni comes from Norway with her family and settles in a croft in the middle of a forest in Sweden. The daughter-in-law of Unni’s son Roar, Kåra, dislikes both the croft and the family. The two stories are presented to the reader in parallel – in every second chapter. Central to the novel is severe poverty, mental illness and deeply held secrets.
The title, echoing the Book of Ruth in the Old Testament, expresses loyalty and togetherness in complicated situations. These values carry a completely different meaning for Unni and Kåra. In addition to good insights into the eras depicted, into nature and psychology, the novel is distinguished by beautiful and lyrical Swedish.
Soon after the debut, Lina Nordquist’s second novel, „Livet innan du dör“ (2022), was published. Here, the time and environment are completely different; this time an area with detached houses in a contemporary urban environment during a single summer evening is depicted. All the people who meet here carry unpleasant secrets or traumas. As in Dit du går, följer jag, the reader alternately sees different people’s perspectives.
Before she became a novelist, Nordquist had a career as a researcher. Nordquist first studied pharmacy and received her doctorate in medical science at Uppsala University in 2007. In addition to research and writing, Lina Nordquist has long been active in the Liberal party, working mainly with health care policy. Since 2018, she has been a member of Sweden’s Riksdag and since 2022, held important posts of group leader for the Liberals in the Riksdag and of deputy party chairman.
Lina’s opinion on an Impossible Dream:
“Quite frankly, I am not a fan of the word ”impossible”. At one time, space trips and female presidencies were considered undoable – unimaginable even. Who are we to decide that something cannot be done? Of course, we should daydream. We should imagine, yearn and hunger for! And we must never forget our only real limitation: do we want it badly enough to really dedicate ourselves?”