Aizpuriete, Amanda

Aizpuriete, Amanda Image 1
Amanda Aizpuriete was born in 1956 in Jurmala near Riga where she has been living until her death in October 2023. She studied linguistics and philosophy at the University of Latvia in Riga and at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow. She has worked as a radio journalist, proofreader and editor, and teaches literary writing.

Amanda Aizpuriete has translated numerous poets from Russian and German into Latvian, including Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, Nikolai Gumilyov, Uwe Kolbe, and Georg Trakl. She has also translated numerous novels from German and English, including Virgina Woolf's Orlando and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

Her own literary works have been translated into fourteen languages, including English, Finnish, German, Lithuanian, Russian, and Swedish. A large number of books of poetry have been published by Amanda Aizpuriete since 1976. In Germany, three of her collections were published by Rowohlt Verlag, translated by Manfred Peter Hein, thus having a major impact.

Amanda Aizpuriete has received several awards; in 1999 she received the Horst Bienek Prize for Poetry and most recently, in 2022, the renowned Vilenica Prize.