Triin Soomets (b. 1969) is an Estonian poet. Having made her debut in 1990 with the poetry collection Blue City (Sinine linn), which formed part of the “Poetry Cassette ’90” series, Soomets has since published several dozen books, most of them poetry collections – although in recent years she has also turned to writing short prose. In the process, she has established herself as one of the most consistent and distinctive female voices in Estonian literature of the new millennium. Her 2013 collection The Properties of Things (Asjade omadused) received the Estonian Cultural Endowment’s poetry award, and her work has also been honoured several times with the Juhan Liiv Poetry Prize. Earlier this year, Soomets published Kingfisher (Jäälind, Loomingu Raamatukogu), which makes a powerful contribution to the increasingly prominent literary exploration of intimate partner violence and the “other gender”. On the one hand, Kingfisher amplifies the voices of women suffering from psychological and social injustice – as well as of men trapped in crises of self-identity – while on the other, it broadens Soomets’s own creative range, adding a strong, even urgent social dimension to her previously philosophical and wordplay-driven approach.
Triin Soomets
