‘Silverwhite’ published in English next year
The iconic work by Lennart Meri, published in 1976, will be translated into English. The translation will be published next spring.
Hõbevalge, the influential work by writer, film director and former President of Estonia, Lennart Meri (1929-2006) will be published for the first time in English as Silverwhite: The Journey to the Fallen Sun. The work is translated by Adam Cullen and published by Hurst Publishers. The translation is set to be published in May 2025.
Silverwhite maps the history of exploration by Finns and Estonians. In the book, Meri uses fact and fiction to illustrate how peoples were discovered and how the image of the ultimate North, the Ultima Thule of legend, developed in the accounts of ancient and Arabic scholars.
Silverwhite has previously been translated into Finnish, Italian and Russian. The Estonian-language original, published in 1976, was primarily published for an Estonian audience. The book was intended to free Estonian history from the schackles of Soviet historiography, as explained by Mart Meri, son of Lennart Meri. ‘But it is interesting that now decades later the work is still interesting to people’, he said to ERR.
The author, Lennart Meri, was one of the most influential figures in 20th-century Estonia. Born into a family of diplomats, he was exiled to Siberia with his family for five years after the Soviet occupation of Estonia in 1940. He studied history and languages at the University of Tartu, but he made his career as a dramaturge and later as a radio journalist. He made several documentary films about Finno-Ugric peoples. He was one of the leading figures of the Singing Revolution that lead to Estonia regaining independence. He was first the Foreign Minister, and from 1992 to 2001 he was the President of Estonia.
