Born: 27 March 1883, Estonia
Died: 25 September 1980
Country most active: Estonia
Also known as: Mutti, Marie Hacker, Marie Adson
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
There are, of course, other reasons that women have been overlooked besides their gender. From 1945 to 1974, Estonian poet Marie Under was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature thirty times. Dr. Sirje Kiin, who wrote her dissertation for her 2010 PhD in comparative literature on Under, identified several reasons for the repeated snub, including the questionable quality of translations from Estonian, particularly given the complexity of her style and language. There is also a bias towards novelists over poets, though poets like Gabriela Mistral (1945), Octavia Paz (1990) and Wislawa Szymborska (1996) have all won the award. Kiin also noted broader changes in European literature following World War II, and the political implications of the time, including the Soviet occupation of Estonia, which led Under and her family to flee to Sweden as refugees.