Merlin Piirve
Merlin Piirve (since 2013 Kirikal, 23. VIII 1986) is a prose writer and literary scholar.
Kirikal has studied Spanish language and culture at the Universities of Tartu, Granada and Barcelona, and defended a master’s degree in literary studies at Tallinn University. She also defended her PhD at the same university with the thesis “”When I was broken open to life”: the depiction of modern gender and body in Johannes Semper‘s pre-World War II work”. Kirikal has worked as an assistant and teacher of Spanish at the University of Tartu; since 2026 she has been working as a senior researcher at the Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences and head of the Department of Modern Literature, and as a researcher in literary studies at the Institute of World Languages and Cultures of the University of Tartu. Kirikal’s main research topics are related to modernism, feminism and body theories in the Estonian context, analyzing, for example, the work of Johannes Semper, Marta Lepp alias Sophia Vardi, Alma Ostra and Aino Kallas. She has written literary criticism, focusing mainly on modern Estonian literature.
Her first book, Ühe maailmavalutaja märkmed (‘Notes from a Weltschmerz Sufferer’, 2012), which concentrates on a young woman’s interior world, is striking in its stylised, sometimes rampant, ‘aerobatic’ use of language. The short story Süü (‘Guilt’, 2012) and some prose-poems (2017) appeared in the journal Värske Rõhk, the short story Sulge uks vaikselt (‘Close the Door Quietly’, 2016) in Looming and the story Vahehetk (‘The In-between Moment’) in the collection Eesti novell 2024 (‘Estonian Short Story, 2024’.).
A. K. (Translated by C. M.)
Books in Estonian
Novels
Ühe maailmavalutaja märkmed. Tallinn: Varrak, 2012, 172 lk.
