Bridging exile and homeland: Estonia’s Visnapuu Award honours a lifetime of literary repair – and a bold new generation.
On a cold January evening in Tallinn, at the Estonian Writers’ House, two very different figures will step into the same long, echoing tradition. One has spent decades patiently stitching together a literary culture torn apart by war and exile. The other is barely in their twenties, already building new bridges across languages, borders and generations. Together, they tell a larger Estonian story – one that stretches from displacement to renewal.
The Estonian American National Council (EANC) has announced the recipients of the 2026 Henrik Visnapuu Culture and Literature Award: literary scholar Janika Kronberg, who receives the Lifetime Achievement Award, and poet Reijo Roos, recognised as an Outstanding Young Author. The ceremony takes place on 7 January – a date that also marks the birthday of Henrik Visnapuu himself.
It is a prize steeped in exile history. First established in the United States in 1952, the Visnapuu Award was born of displacement – an attempt by Estonian refugees to keep cultural continuity alive after the Second World War. Revived by EANC in 2020 after a long hiatus, it now consciously spans geography, genre and generation, reflecting a literature that no longer lives in one place alone.
Named after Henrik Visnapuu, the award carries the imprint of one of Estonia’s most restless and influential literary figures. A central member of the Siuru movement, Visnapuu was both a poet of intimate lyricism and a public intellectual deeply involved in shaping Estonian cultural policy in the interwar years and during the upheavals of occupation.
Forced into exile in 1944, he continued writing abroad, becoming a key figure in sustaining Estonian literary life beyond the homeland. His life embodies the very tensions the award now addresses: between exile and return, rupture and continuity, national culture and international survival.
Repairing a broken canon
For Janika Kronberg, the award recognises more than scholarly output. It honours a life’s work of cultural repair.
For decades, Estonian literature existed in parallel worlds: one produced in Soviet-occupied Estonia, the other written in exile, often unread – or unreadable – at home. As Kronberg has noted, even authoritative literary histories once suggested that exile literature might simply be left out altogether.
His response has been quietly radical: refuse the division.
Through books such as Under the Sign of the Winged Horse, Journeys with Six Guides and Three Karls, Kronberg has worked to weave exile writing back into a single, shared Estonian literary fabric. His scholarship is rigorous but never remote. He has followed writers’ physical paths as well as their textual ones – retracing the journeys of figures such as Karl Ast-Rumor in Morocco and Karl Ristikivi in Greece – insisting that literary history is also lived history.
The literary scholar Rein Veidemann has described his work as the weaving of a “cultural fabric”, where human relationships give national literary history an almost intimate, local dimension. Unlike novelists such as Jaan Kross, Kronberg does not fictionalise his subjects. His authority lies precisely in the balance between empathy and fact.
Beyond his writing, he has shaped Estonian literary life institutionally – as director of the Estonian Literary Museum, head of the Tartu branch of the Estonian Writers’ Union, and editor-in-chief of Looming. In recognising him, the Visnapuu Award acknowledges not only scholarship, but stewardship.
A bridge-builder in real time
If Kronberg represents the patient reassembly of the past, Reijo Roos embodies literature in motion.
Born in 2003, Roos has already done more than many writers twice his age. While still at school, he compiled Sinisild / Sinisilta, a bilingual Estonian–Finnish poetry anthology. He went on to found Young Writers of the Writers’ Union and launch Grafomaania, an annual almanac that has become a focal point for a new generation of authors.
His second book, Tere kas tohib / tere kas võisõ, moves fluidly between Estonian, Võro and Finnish – a trilingual assertion that language is not a boundary but a medium of connection. Now studying in Helsinki, Roos lives the Finnish–Estonian bridge he is helping to strengthen.
In today’s geopolitical climate, that bridge carries weight beyond culture. As the jury noted, maintaining it is not only a creative act, but a strategic and European one – an insistence on openness, dialogue and shared cultural space.
Poet and jury member Jürgen Rooste recalls seeing Roos, year after year during the pandemic, standing quietly at Visnapuu’s grave on 2 January. It is a telling image: a young poet consciously placing himself in a lineage shaped by exile, loss and persistence.
A prize shaped by exile – and return
The Visnapuu Award is administered by EANC in cooperation with the Estonian Writers’ Union and the municipality of Luunja, Visnapuu’s home parish. Each laureate receives $3,000, along with a unique artwork commissioned from an Estonian artist – a reminder that literature, too, is part of a wider cultural ecosystem.
Visnapuu himself fled Estonia in 1944, eventually dying in the United States in 1951. In a quietly symbolic act of historical closure, his remains were reinterred in Tallinn’s Metsakalmistu cemetery in 2018, beside his wife, who had waited there for more than seventy years.
That return mirrors the arc of the award that bears his name: from exile to reconnection, from rupture to continuity.
In honouring Janika Kronberg and Reijo Roos together, the 2026 Visnapuu Award makes a clear statement. Estonian culture is not a museum piece, nor a nostalgic relic of exile. It is a living, multilingual, transnational conversation – one that remembers where it has been, and is confident enough to imagine where it is going next.
