Taavi Eelmaa

Taavi Eelmaa (born 15 June 1971) is an actor and poet.

Eelmaa was born in Tallinn in an actor’s family. He graduated from the Department of Drama at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre in 1996. From 1996–2002, he worked at the Estonian Drama Theatre in Tallinn. From 2002, he has been an actor of Von Krahl Theatre.

Eelmaa has played in several full-length and short feature films and television serials. He has written theatrical texts. Kadunud sõbra juhtum (‘The Case of the Lost Friend’, 2014) is a play where the characters find themselves in realistic and dreamlike, invented and believable situations.

In 2020, Taavi Eelmaa received the Betti Alver Debut Prize for his poetry collection Electraumur. Some of the poems in the book are extremely brief, there are one-lone insertions and haiku-like poems, but some poems extend to several pages. The motifs of the poems are also diverse, ranging from dreamy pictures of nature to technological images. A connecting feature of nearly all the poems is their peculiar dark melancholy. Eelmaa’s imagery is specific – emphatic but succinct.

The poetry collection Unekoridor (‘Dream Corridor’, 2022) consists of free-verse texts carried by the magic of dreams. Changeable states of mind and memory pictures surpassing reality reach the reader in a flow.

Taavi Eelmaa has been a member of the Estonian Writers’ Union from 2023.

L. P. (Translated by I. A.)

Books in Estonia

Poetry
Electraumur. Luige: Verb, 2020. 46 lk.
Unekoridor. Luige: Verb, 2022. 63 lk.