Tõnu Õnnepalu (born 1962, has published works under the pseudonyms of Emil Tode and Anton Nigov) is one of the most interesting and internationally known Estonian prose authors. He began his writing career as a poet in 1985 and has published three collections. His real breakthrough came in 1993 when he published "Border State" (Piiririik) under the pseudonym Emil Tode for which he received the annual literary award given by the Baltic Assembly. "Border State" enjoyed an explosive success internationally and became the most translated Estonian book of the 1990s, appearing in translation in 14 languages. It is a book which could not have been written and published before in Estonian.Here, there is the then new experience of Estonia and the rest of the former Soviet bloc as life beyond its borders is opened up as the Soviet Union collapsed. The novel examines the opposites east and west, Estonia and Europe. The protagonist is a young homosexual man on a bursary in Paris and who tries, by way of personal experience, to fathom the changes taking place throughout Europe in the early 1990s. The themes of the book are his relationship with an older West European man and a murder sub-plot. At the start of the 1990s, the principle questions an Estonian would ask himself or herself was: who are we? What is this world we see before us? What rules have to be obeyed here? The protagonist is a representative of the "noble savage" who tries to familiarise himself with these new rules. Maybe the international success of the book was on account of this dimension: the East European "savage" spoke, but did so in a way understandable to readers in Western Europe itself. Writing as Emil Tode, the author continued this theme in "Price" (Hind, 1995) and a novel from a woman's point of view "Princess" (1997). Central to these books is a quest for identity in a changing world. Under another pseudonym, Anton Nigov on this occasion, the author has published a further novel entitles "Practicing" (Harjutused, 2002) which is a kind of confessional diary. Again writing under the name Emil Tode, the author published that same year a continuation of the themes examined in "Border State" in "Radio". This time the theme is the life of an ageing diva whose life is intricated with that of a young gay. In all his books, Õnnepalu seeks the answers to various crucial human questions covering love and loneliness, sexuality, social life and religious freedom, power over others and betrayal. Õnnepalu has translated works from the French by the authors François Mauriac, Charles Baudelaire and Marcel Proust.