Kurzemes Poetry Days

Kurzemes Poetry Days is a festival what takes place every year in Kurzeme region in different cities and this year in Ventspils. Poets from the region will come and have readings in different places of Ventspils.

Kurzemes Poetry Days will start at 11.00 with the event "Garainis" in the Parventa library. Tārgales iela 4.

The exhibition "Plein-air in Pholx" will be opened, with the works of Daiga Krūze, Kristīna Keire, Ieva Rupenheite and Jānis Kupčs, members of the plein-air of Pope Manor. This will be followed by a discussion about creativity led by Dace Vašuka and poetry reading by Ieva Rupenheite . Maija Kalniņa will perform songs with Olaf Gūtmanis and her own poetry.

At 13:30 poet Iveta Dārzniece-Tarvida , will read her poetry in the new Gāliņciema library, Kuldīgas iela 138.

At 14:30 nearby, Laura Vinogradova will read her poetry in local Ventiņ dialect at the Herberta Dorbes Museum, Ērgļu iela 1.

At 16:00 Andris Akmentiņš will read his poetry in the Livonian Order Castle, accompanied with pianist Andrejs Martiņš Grīnbergs, Jāņa iela 17

At the end of the poetry days at 17:00, poet Jānis Vādons  will read his poetry on the roof of the VIZIUM science center and there will be also readings by Kurzeme poets, Rūpniecības iela 2.

Tasmanian artist and writer commemorates 14 June deportations with a performance at Ventspils market

Tasmanian artist and writer, Brigita Ozolins, will commemorate the 1941 deportation of 15,500 Latvians to Siberia with a one-day performance on 14 June in the Ventspils Market. 

Starting in the morning, she will nail copies of the top secret NKVD documents that list the names, birthdates and addresses of those who were arrested on 13 and 14 June in 1941 to the wooden walls of the market stage. The lists have been sourced from These Names Accuse, a book that documents Order No 001223, signed by the Deputy People’s Commissar of Public Security of the USSR, Serov.

Brigita will continue the performance by handwriting the names of all the people who were arrested in Ventspils on sheets of paper. After completing each page, she will ring a bell and nail it to the walls of the stage alongside the other pages.

The performance will start at 9am and finish at 6pm. IMembers of the public will be permitted to climb onto the stage to view the performance and the pages nailed to the stage walls.

Brigita is a resident at the International Writers and Translators house where she is editing a novel she has written about her mother’s escape from Latvia during WW2.

She said that while the performance commemorates all the deportees of June 1941, it is also dedicated to the memory of her late mother, Mirdza Ozolins, and her mother’s friend, Aldona Ikmanis, who was amongst the deportees.

‘My mother was fourteen years old when she witnessed Aldona and her family being arrested by the Soviets on 14 June, 1941,’ said Brigita. ‘She never saw her friend again but two years ago, we found out that Aldona was released from a gulag in Novosibirsk in 1956. We both cried, happy that Aldona had been freed, but deeply saddened because she had spent fifteen years in a labour camp in Siberia.’

Brigita is well known in Tasmania for her performances and large-scale installations that explore the relationships between language, culture, history, writing and codes. A first draft of her book was longlisted for the Richell Emerging Writers Prize in 2021 and in 2022, she was awarded and Australian Society of Authors mentorship. She has also received a Latvian State Capital Culture Foundation grant to support her residency. She will be resident at the Writers House until the 28 June.

Multilingual poetry readings

In September, the Serbian translator Vera Horvat, who came to learn the Latvian language and translate the works of Latvian poets, is visiting the International House of Writers and Translators with the support of the EU Creative Europe project "Translation in Motion".

Vera Horvat, together with other authors from the Writers' House, will perform at the poetry reading on September 8, 17.00 in the Pārventas library at Multilingual Poetry Readings.

At the event, we will hear Vera’s Horvat reading in Serbian, Petro Tarashchuk in Ukrainian, Valerya Kustava in Belarusian, Monika Littau in German and Katrīna Rudzīti in Latvian.

Vera Horvat is an art scholar and translator from Serbia. Starting from 1992, she published her first translations from Russian, and in 2000 she received the most important award in Serbia for poetry translation. Since then, she has translated more than 20 books of poetry; most of them are associated with poetry festivals and published as bilingual books.

Vera Horvat lives in Serbia and her native language is Serbian and her second native language is Russian. She has also translated from English and Bulgarian. She mainly translates contemporary poetry.

The project is financially supported by the Creative Europe program of the EU

#CreativeEurope4Books.