Piret Jaaks (b. 1980) is an Estonian prose writer, playwright and screenwriter. She entered the literary scene in the early 2000s as a member of the Tartu NAK literary group. Jaaks came to wider attention in 2011, when her play Seeing a Pink Elephant (Näha roosat elevanti) won the Estonian Theatre Agency’s playwriting competition. This was followed by the magical-realist short prose collection Urban Legend (Linnalegend, 2015), for which she received the Betti Alver Debut Prize. To date, she has published six works of prose and more than twenty plays. Jaaks made her debut in the novel genre in 2023 with the historical novel Daughters of the Sky (Taeva tütred), which won third prize in the Estonian Writers’ Union novel competition. The book tells the story of Hedwig Büll, a Baltic German missionary hailing from Estonia, whose selfless actions during the First World War have been compared to those of Mother Teresa. A year later, Jaaks published the novel Moose Light (Põdravalgus), based on her award-winning play Rites of Passage (Siirderiitujad). This magical-realist relationship novel draws inspiration from Estonian rural life and folklore; alongside the shifting dynamics between its human characters, a white elk that speaks human language plays a central role in the narrative.
Piret Jaaks
