Krull, Hasso

Krull, Hasso Image 1

Hasso Krull © Piia Ruber

Hasso Krull (b. 1964) is an Estonian poet who has published ten books of poetry and three collections of essays that include literary criticism as well as writings concerning art and cinema. He has been teaching literary and cultural theory at the Estonian Institute of Humanities since 1990 (special courses on creation myths, oral tradition, romanticism and symbolism, structuralism and psychoanalysis etc). In 2001 Krull founded a poetry translation review Ninniku with Kalju Kruusa (www.eki.ee/ninniku/), in 2003 there followed a book series Ninniku Raamatukogu.

He has acquired several prizes for poetry and criticism from the Estonian literary reviews, the Annual Prize of  the Cultural Endowment of Estonia for essays in 1998 and 2007, the Annual Prize of  the Cultural Endowment of Estonia for poetry in 2002 and 2010, the Baltic Assembly Prize for literature in 2005 and the Tallinn University Literary Prize in 2007. Anthological pieces from his poetry have been translated into Finnish, Swedish, Dutch, English, French, German, Spanish, Slovenian, Slovak, Russian, Galician, Catalan and Latvian.

He has translated poetry from French (André Breton, René Char, Francis Ponge, Bernard Noël, Edmond Jabès, Mohammed Dib, Amina Said, Tahar Ben Jelloun), English (Sylvia Plath, Frank O'Hara, Rita Dove, Michael Ondaatje, Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, Sujata Bhatt, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bernstein, John Berryman, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams), Dutch (Cees Nooteboom, Hans van de Waarsenburg, Arjen Duinker, Diana Ozon), German (Michael Augustin), Finnish (Caj Westerberg, Tomi Kontio, Jouni Tossavainen, Tapani Kinnunen, Saila Susiluoto), Swedish (Claes Andersson) and Spanish (Pablo Neruda). Besides poetry, he has also translated prose works by Georges Bataille, Jean Cocteau, Paul Valéry, a book of Winnebago trickster tales recorded by Paul Radin, and theoretical works by Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Paul Virilio, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Pierre Bourdieu, Slavoj Zizek, Walter Benjamin, Ernesto Laclau.