Biography

PĒTERS BRŪVERIS was born in Riga in 1957. After graduating from the Department of Art and Culture at the Latvian State Conservatory, he worked as a literary consultant to the newspaper Latvijas Jaunatne (Latvian Youth) and as the director of the literary department of the newspaper Literatura un Maksla (Art and Literature). Eight collections of his poetry have been published: Black Thrush, Red Cherries (1987), Amber Skulls (1991), Sitting On A Park Bench (1994), Black Bird’s Nest in the Heart (1995), Flowers for Losers! (1999), Love Me God (2000), The Landscape of Language (2004), and Behind Glass (2006). He has also written four books for children, librettos, song lyrics and texts for animation films. He translated and edited a collection of Turkish poetry entitled Courtyards Filled with Pigeons (1988, together with Uldis Bērziņš), as well as translated the works of Lithuanian poets Kornelijs Platelis, Sigits Gedas, Henriks Raudausks, Toms Venclova, and others. His translations include poetry and prose from Azerbaijani, the Crimean Tatar language, Russian, Germany, and Prussian. His poetry has been published in Lithuanian, Russian, Swedish, German, Slovenian, Ukrainian and English translation. He has received the Klāvs Elsbergs Award (1987), the Publisher Preses Nams Award in Literature (2000 and 2001), the Days of Poetry Prize (2001 and 2005), the Award in Literature from the Baltic Assembly (2004), the Ojars Vacietis Poetry Prize (2006) and the National Prize for Best Book (2007).

INARA CEDRINS is an artist, writer and translator of Latvian descent who received her BA in Writing from Columbia College in Chicago and her MA in Arts Administration at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her anthology of contemporary Latvian poetry written while Latvia was under Soviet occupation was published by the University of Iowa Press, and she is currently working on a new Baltic anthology.