Maarja Pärtna (Estonia)

Maarja Pärtna is the 2024 Tartu City Writer, translator, and editor, who engages in her work with socio-ecological themes.

She has published five poetry collections. Among them, the most recent are the spatially poetic “Vivarium” (2019), which combines historical trauma with climate anxiety, and the prose poetry collection “Living City” (2022), which focuses on urban nature, the possibility of better coexistence with non-human animals, as well as the lyrical self’s childhood memories. These lead back to the traces of ecocide from the Estonian oil shale industry, which is one of the local manifestations of the global ecological crisis.

Pärtna studied English language and literature, as well as world literature, at the University of Tartu. As a translator, she has translated essays by Kathleen Jamie, Margaret Atwood, Edward Said, and Robert Macfarlane into Estonian. She has worked as a literary editor for the publications Müürileht and Värske Rõhk and edited several poetry collections. Pärtna has been awarded the Gustav Suits Poetry Prize, the Juhan Liiv Poetry Prize, and the title of Young Cultural Ambassador of Tartu. Her poems have been translated into more than ten languages.