Maarja Kangro, poet, translator, fiction writer and librettist, was born on December 20, 1973, in Tallinn, Estonia. She has published three collections of poetry: Kurat õrnal lumel [A Devil on Tender Snow], 2006; Tule mu koopasse, mateeria [Come into My Cave, Matter], 2007; and Heureka [Eureka], 2008. Heureka received the Estonian Cultural Endowment Award for poetry in 2009. Both Heureka and Tule mu koopasse, mateeria won the Tallinn University Literary Prize, in 2008 and 2009, respectively. She has also published literary criticism, essays, short stories and a children’s book Puuviljadraakon [Fruit Dragon], 2006, which received the Estonian Children’s Literature Centre’s Best Book of the Year Award. She has written four opera librettos, and texts for cantatas and chamber songs. She has translated theory (Giorgio Agamben, Umberto Eco), fiction (Kazuo Ishiguro) and poetry by more than 100 poets. These include Jacopone da Todi, Giacomo Leopardi, Andrea Zanzotto, Edoardo Sanguineti, Valerio Magrelli, Bertolt Brecht, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Ernst Jandl, H.C. Artmann, Gerhard Rühm and Michel Houellebecq. In 2003 she won first prize in the Società Dante Alighieri competition for translations of Italian poetry. She has studied English literature at Tartu University, cultural theory at the Estonian Institute of Humanities, Italian literature at La Sapienza University in Rome, and is currently a Ph.D. student in cultural theory at Tallinn University. She lives in Tallinn.
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