Paul-Eerik Rummo

Paul-Eerik Rummo (1942) is a writer and politician and it seems that out of all the signatories of the letter of 40 Estonian intellectuals of 1980, Rummo is the one who has gradually shifted towards politics the most, his literary activities slipping to the background. Rummo’s significance as a poet and playwright is mostly linked to the 1960s and 1970s. This is the era when he published his core poems that were innovative in form and socially sensitive in content. In 1969, his transformative play Tuhkatriinumäng (Cinderella Game) hit the stage. However, since the late 1980s until today, Rummo’s role as a politician has been in the foreground (for example, in 1992, he became the Minister for Culture and Education). In the new millennium, his literary work has mostly focused on summarizing earlier endeavours (for instance, his Collected Poems from 2005). Yet the above could be deceptive in many ways: recently, Rummo and Sigrid Tooming won the Aleksander Kurtna Prize for their translation of Henrik Ibsen’s verse drama Brand. This means that words of fiction created or mediated by Rummo still carry great weight. You can meet Paul-Eerik Rummo on Friday, 29 May at 6 pm in Kloostri Ait, when he will be joined in conversation by literary scholar and poet Wimberg.