Eneken Laanes was born in Äksi, Estonia, in 1972. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Tartu and has been visiting scholar at the University of Bologna, the Free University of Berlin and a Juris Padegs Research Fellow at Yale University.

Nowadays she works as a senior research fellow at the Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences and as Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Analysis at Tallinn University.

She has published a book on the Estonian contemporary novel in the post-Soviet memory culture (Unresolved Dialogues: Subjectivity and Memory in Post-Soviet Estonian Novel / in Estonian /, 2009) and edited a collection of articles dedicated to the Estonian novelist Jaan Kross. Her current research focuses on history in fiction and on the politics of literature after the ethical turn. She is co-ed. of: Novels, Histories, Novel Nations: Historical Fiction and Cultural Memory in Finland and Estonia, 2015