Mati Unt is a prominent prose writer, as well as a playwright, and has more recently become active as a stage director. He arrived on the literary scene in the early 1960s and was instrumental in introducing modernism into Soviet Estonian letters. In the 1970s Unt became one of the initiators of postmodernist writing in Estonia.

Unlike most Estonian writers of his generation, Unt grew up not in an urban setting but in a secluded forest village. He was born on 1 January 1944 in the village of Linnamäe in Voore Parish, Tartumaa, the only child of August and Linda (née Busch) Unt. His father was a bookkeeper at a dairy, and his mother was a clerk on a collective farm. Unt attended the Leedimäe primary school until he was fourteen, when he moved to Tartu to continue his studies at High School Number...