Merlin Piirve

Short stories

Merlin Piirve (since 2013 Kirikal, 23. VIII 1986) is a prose writer and literary scholar.

Kirikal studied Spanish language and culture at the universities of Tartu, Granada and Barcelona. She received master’s degree in literature at the University of Tallinn where she also continues as a doctorate in cultural research. She has worked as an assistant and a lecturer in Spanish at the University of Tartu, and been a research secretary at the Under and Tuglas Literary Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences.

The main themes of her research are modernism, feminism and theories of the body, in the analysis of, for example, the works of Johannes Semper. She has written literary criticism, concentrating mainly on recent Estonian literature.

Her first book, Ühe maailmavalutaja märkmed (‘Notes from a Weltschmerz Suffer’, 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 and the short story Sulge uks vaikselt (‘Close the Door Quietly’, 2016) in Looming.

A. K. (Translated by C. M.)

Books in Estonian

Novels
Ühe maailmavalutaja märkmed. Tallinn: Varrak, 2012, 172 lk.