Urmas Vadi

Urmas Vadi (1977) is an Estonian writer, journalist, screenwriter and theatre producer. Vadi began his literary career as a member of the Tartu NAK group in the late 1990s; in the early noughties, he published mainly short story collections and plays, searching for and honing his style, so that his 2010 book Kirjad tädi Annele already gave a clearer idea of Vadi’s characteristic prose style that combines (auto)biographical elements and fantasy games that border on the absurd. Vadi finds meaningful events or contacts with cultural figures in his own life, which allows him to create extravagant stories based on them. Lacking a better definition, Vadi could be called a magical humorist, although some darker streams have appeared in his stories over time. For example in his collection of short stories titled Kuidas me kõik reas niimoodi läheme (2014), a sense of the fleeting nature of human life is clearly palpable. In 2012, Vadi published the prose work Tagasi Eestisse, which could be called his first ‘proper’ novel. This was followed by the highly popular Neverland (2017) and last year’s Kuu teine pool, which made Vadi one of the most widely-read authors in Estonia. Here, too, he combines autobiographical elements with a humorous approach; however, the story of a mother and son at the centre of the story is a contemplation of the fragility of closeness and the inevitability of transience. Urmas Vadi will speak to Sven Mikser.

• Estonian Literature Centre