Katrin Laur

Laur learned photography at the Tallinn Technical School N°2 and studied philosophy for one year at the Moscow State University.

After graduating from the film school she left the Soviet Union with her then-husband, a Colombian fellow student, and their three-year-old daughter.

In 1993 she published a collection of poetry "Sõnad" ("Words") (Tallinn: Kunst, 1993)[2] In 1994 Laur moved to Berlin and took up filmmaking again, especially scriptwriting script consulting.

Her interest in history and the way time shapes the lives of people manifests itself in two feature-length documentaries: „Debora Vaarandi aeg“ („Poet and her Time“),[3] about a celebrated poet Debora Vaarandi (1916–2007), one of the people who supported the Soviet takeover in 1940 and was close to the regime throughout the Soviet occupation and who still wrote great poetry in her later years.

(Tallinn: Hea Lugu, 2022, 832 p.)[4] 2023 Katrin Laur was awarded the prestigious Jaan Kross literary prize for "The Witness".