Illar Luht

Estonian, born in Jõgeva county in Eastern Estonia, about 60 kilometers from the university town of Tartu. I wrote my first story around the age of 10, which was about a snow leopard running away from hunters. I was a pretty poor student in elementary school, but the older I got, the better my grades got. I trained hard and fought a lot. I had bad friends and there were times when I was drunk almost every day. Since Estonia was then part of the Soviet Union, I had to serve time in the Soviet army. I was sent to Mariuopol, which at that time bore the name of the man who led the occupation of Estonia by the Soviet Union - Zhdanov. I served as an operator at a radar station. After the army, I worked in a construction company and later started studying Estonian and Finno-Ugric philology at the University of Tartu. I wrote poems and sometimes one of my stories was published in the newspaper. A few years after starting university in 1999, I went to live in Hungary. I am a Christian and my worldview is very different from the modern liberal worldview, which is why it has been difficult for me to find my place in society. Now I'm already sixty and I plan to spend the rest of my life writing books.