Katlin Kaldmaa

Kätlin Kaldmaa is an Estonian poet, writer, translator and literary critic. Currently, she is the President of Estonian PEN and served as the International Secretary of PEN International (2016-2022) and Publisher at the Publishing house Wolf. She was also the Founder/Editor-in-Chief Estonian first book magazine “Lugu” (“Story”) (2010-2016). In 2025 she established a Women’s Literature Prize in Estonia which is only the fourth Women’s Prize in Europe and the biggest ever literature prize in Estonia.

She studied English Language and Culture in Tallinn University, Semiotics and Anglistics in Estonian Institute of Humanities, Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics in Tartu University.

She has published five collections of poetry “Larii-laree” (1996), “One is None” (2008) and “Worlds, Unseen” (2009), “The Alphabet of Love” (2012), “My Wings Are My Roots” (2023), five books for children, “Four Children and Murka” (2010), “The Story of Someone Nobodysdaughter” (2016), “It’s Damn Good to be a Bad Girl“ (2016), “Lydia” (2021) and “Christmas the Icelandic Way” (2024), autobiographical works of nonfiction, „Happiness is the Matter of Choice” (2013) and “Two Love Stories“ (2017), short story collections “The Small Sharp Knife” (2014) and “Taming of the Wolf” (2021), and novels “No Butterflies in Iceland” (2013) & “Lessons in Eating Glass” (2025).

Collections of her poems have been published in English, “One is None” (2014), Arabic “Geography of Love” (2015), Finnish, “The Alphabet of Love” (2015), Spanish (2017) “La geografía del amor“, Slovenian (2020) “Love is.” and Greek “My Love Laughs at Me”, a collection of short stories and the novel in Hungarian, a novel, short stories, and autobiography in Finnish, a children’s book “The Story of Someone Nobodysdaughter“ in Icelandic and “It’s Damn Good to be a Bad Girl” in Latvian. Upcoming collections of poetry in Catalan, Italian and Croatian.

She has written widely on literature, mostly literature in translation, and has translated more than 50 works of the world's best literature from the British Isles to Latin America.

Among the authors she has translated are Jeanette Winterson, Aphra Behn, Michael Ondaatje, James Meek, Ali Smith, Meg Rosoff, Madeleine Thien, Goran Simić, and Gabriel García Márquez. Her own poetry has been translated into Arabic, Asturian, Czech, Finnish, French, English, Galician, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Turkish.

In 2012 she won the annual Friedebert Tuglas short story award. In 2021 she won the Eesti Kultuurkapital children’s literature award for “Lydia”. Her books have been nominees to many awards.