Lilli Luuk is an Estonian writer and art historian born in Paide in 1976. She studied history at the University of Tartu, where she completed a master’s degree in art history, and later taught philosophy and art history at Pallas University of Applied Sciences. After making her literary debut in the journal Looming in 2017, she received the Friedebert Tuglas Short Story Award for both “Auk” and “Kolhoosi miss” and became a full-time freelance writer in 2021.
Her fiction often returns to Estonia’s twentieth-century ruptures, exploring how war, occupation and social change persist in family memory and private experience. Luuk’s books include the short-story collection Kolhoosi miss and the novels Minu venna keha (My Brother’s Body) and Ööema (Night Mother). The latter moves between historical periods and foregrounds women negotiating the legacies of the Second World War; it received the Tammsaare Literary Award in 2025 and the Arved Viirlaid Literary Prize in 2026, and was shortlisted for the 2026 European Union Prize for Literature.
In June 2026, Luuk published Lühike sõjaajalugu (A Short History of War), a new collection focused on people in war and the wars carried within them. On 7 October 2026 she appeared on Estonian public television’s Kirjandusministri juures, discussing nonlinear narrative, memory and fiction as a way to revisit history.