Gints Zilbalodis: Doing it all
Latvian prodigy Gints Zilbalodis’ critically acclaimed debut animated feature Away is a stunning, dialogue-free film about a boy travelling across an island on a motorcycle, trying to escape a dark spirit and return home. Along the way, he makes a series of connections with different animals and reflects on how he may have ended up...
First impressions
Novels from Latvia, Uzbekistan and Poland competed for the 2019 EBRD Literature Prize, established by the London-based European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to celebrate the best fiction in translation from the 38 territories where the bank invests, from Morocco to Mongolia, Estonia to Egypt. The judges were journalist and founder-director of the European Literature Network...
New happiness
There is a Latvian goddess of happiness, Laima. It was most probably she who instilled the Latvian language with its rhythmical lilt, its roguish plosives and stops, the stark, spare melodiousness of its musicality. It was most probably she who lured generations of Latvians, both ancient and modern, to their native forests and fields –...
Derealization
David Bezmozgis’ latest novel The Betrayers is a powerful study of the nature of principles and loyalty, relating the events of a single momentous day in the life of a disgraced Israeli politician and former Soviet dissident who refuses to back down from a contrary stand over the West Bank. We peek inside his writer’s room… Where...
