Letter from Tartu

Imagine a leafy, sparsely populated city with abundant birdlife and great coffee shops, where national pride manifests freely in the form of widespread respect for the environment and enthusiastic attendance at literary-cultural events. If you’ve lived mainly in England and are reading PNR, this probably sounds like Utopia. Alighting in the pristine, largely empty airport in Tallinn after a delayed flight from Dante’s nth circle (aka London Luton), you can be forgiven the cognitive dissonance you experience walking by the airport café (cosily furnished with bookshelves, standard lamps and sheepskin rugs) and along the glass exit/entrance corridor (tastefully flanked by quotations from the country’s great contemporary composer). ‘Love is the source of all arts. Art exists as long as the ability sto love exists.’ Welcome to Estonia.

From the spotless public coach (equipped with free hot drinks machine) we watch woodland and farmland roll by on either side of the road. We spy storks nesting in the tops of pines. We think we glimpse (in retrospect unlikely) a lone wolf loping across a field. We are destined for Tartu, Estonia’s second city, to take part in the annual Prima Vista literary festival.

[PB: My association with Tartu began in the summer of 2022, when I applied for a month’s residency through the UNESCO Cities of Literature network and quickly fell in love with this compact, romantic, quiet university town. Since then I’ve returned to Estonia a dozen times, in one capacity or another – to other festivals, for collaborations, and for a madcap makeshift residency on the remote ...