Hellar Grabbi

Hellar Grabbi (22 September 1929 – 28 July 2018) was an Estonian-American journalist, literary critic, editor, publisher and essayist. He was best known as the long-time editor and publisher of Mana, an Estonian exile literary and cultural journal. Scholarly accounts of Estonian exile literature describe him as an important intermediary between writers abroad and in Soviet Estonia, and as an unusually non-ideological critic within the émigré community.

Early life and education Hellar Grabbi was born in Tallinn, the son of Colonel , commander of the Estonian Military Academy and aide-de-camp to the Estonian president. His father was arrested by the NKVD in 1941 and later executed in Siberia.

Writing on the history of Estonian literary scholarship in exile, Tiit Hennoste notes that under Grabbi's editorship Mana was explicitly recast not as a magazine of exile literature but as a journal of Estonian literature and culture more broadly. Marin Laak and Janika Kronberg write that Grabbi occupied an exceptional place in the comparatively conservative Estonian expatriate community because, through Mana, he cultivated extensive contacts with writers in occupied Estonia and judged their work primarily by aesthetic rather than ideological criteria.

Writings Grabbi published collections of literary criticism, political essays and memoiristic prose from the 1990s onward. His later books included the essay collections Vabal häälel (1997), Tulgu uus taevas (1999) and Eestlaste maa (2004), followed by a four-volume memoir sequence published between 2008 and 2014. the Order of the National Coat of Arms, 3rd Class, in 2006, and the Estonian Cultural Endowment's annual literature award in essay writing for Vabariigi laps. In 2012 he received the Cultural Prize of the Republic of Estonia for long-term activity and outstanding creative achievement.