The HeadRead literary festival has lasted long enough for our programme to develop recurrences that we call traditions. However, one of these traditions is older than the festival – the poetry mass at the Niguliste Museum was part of the programme of the Nordic Poetry Festival led by one of the predecessors of the HeadRead festival, translator and cultural trailblazer Eha Vainu. Our festival will gladly carry forward the practice initiated by Eha in order to bring together voices from Estonia and beyond in Niguliste. This year, as before, a diverse group of poets will perform: Veiko Belials (1966), better known as a science fiction writer and populariser of science fiction, published his eighth collection of poems last year, Tiigri aasta, written in 2022; poet, translator, philosopher and visionary Hasso Krull (1964), who has published 19 collections of poetry since the 1980s, several of which have strongly shaped recent Estonian poetry; Ukrainian translator and poet Katja Novak (1998), who was awarded the Consensus Prize in 2023 for maintaining cultural relations between Ukraine and Estonia; poet and literary therapist Berit Kaschan (1986), one of the most important new voices in poetry in recent years, whose most recent collection of poems, Täna piisab vähesest, published in 2022, was nominated for the Cultural Endowment’s Poetry Prize, and the festival’s foreign guest, Irish literary scholar and poet Laoighseach Ni Choisdealbha. Music by Krista Citra Joonas.
Entry with a Niguliste Museum ticket. The ticket gives access to the exhibition Estonian Book 500: Relics and the museum exposition throughout the day.
