ELO VIIDING Comments

Elo Viiding was born on March 20,1970 in Tallinn, Estonia. She is the third poet in her family: her grandfather, Paul Viiding, belonged to the group Arbujad in the 1930s, and her father Juhan Viiding (pseudonym Jüri Üdi) was an innovative poet in the 1970s and has influenced many younger poets in Estonia. So it is understandable that people sometimes speak of a dynasty of Viidings in Estonian literature. [Estonian Literary Magazine]

The theatre and music have also great importance for the Viiding family – her father was an actor and a dramatist and her mother was a music teacher in kindergarten. Elo studied violin in the Music Secondary School and she also graduated as an actress in 1999. It is apparent that theatricality is not a strange phenomenon in her poetry: different roles and identities have been characteristic of her poetic ‘ego’, as well as dramatic motifs and situations.

Elo Viiding is one of the most distinguished Estonian poets, not only currently but also in terms of the history of Estonian literature. She is a woman who has a very strong, and at the same time also sensitive, social awareness: she strives to speak critically about problems in society and all the things that may oppress human freedom.