Literature Without Borders is non-governmental non-profit project promoting the dialogue between different national literary (especially poetry) traditions and authorial communities. Our main activities include the residence for poets and translators in Ozolnieki, Latvia and publishing the books of poetry and poetic prose, primarily translated (including the works of our residents).
20.07.2024
Russian poetry magazine Vozdukh (Air) is now published in Latvia. Its first issue produced by Literature Without Borders was celebrated in Berlin on July 12.
20.03.2024
The second presentation of the book of selected poems by the Ukrainian poet Yuri Tarnavsky in Russian translations by Dmitry Kuzmin took place in Tallinn on March 15.
Present-day writing is preconditioned with freedom of creative endeavour as well as with involvement in unlimited dialogue of persons and cultures. Our mission is to assist the authors in reaching each other and their readers through collaborative work on translations and multilingual books.
We are especially concerned in Russian literature that is expected to survive hodiernal political disaster and pave the way to post-totalitarian future.
Literature Without Borders is a successor project for Vavilon/ARGO-RISK, the organizational hub for the newest innovative Russian literature, active in Moscow from 1989. Since 2015 we work in Latvia.
In Ozolnieki, a village located in 40 minutes commute from the capital city of Latvian Republic, two cozy apartments named after two great poets, the Russian Ossip Mandelstam and the Latvian Aleksandrs Čaks, are in wait for the authors and translators. Opening: Spring 2016.
Guests from different countries are welcome for creative work based on cooperation and dialogue: translation, mutual reflection, other collaborative projects. Texts produced in this residence enjoy priority being considered for our publishing program.
Anuar Duisenbinov is a poet and translator born in 1985. Usually he writes in Russian but in our residence in June 2016 worked on the first anthology of present-day Russian poetry in Kazakh translation.
Izabela Morska (earlier known as Izabela Filipiak) is writer , essayist, poet and scholar from Poland. She was born in 1961 and graduated from Gdańsk university where she is teaching now after being habilitated with her dissertation “Glorious Outlaws: Debt As a Tool in Contemporary Postcolonial Fiction” (2016). She lived in emigration from 1986 to 1996 and became the first openly lesbian author in Poland after coming out in 1998. She has published novels “Absolute amnesia” (1995) and “Alma” (2003), short stories collections “Death and spiral” (1992) and “Magic eye” (2006), poetry collection “Madame Intuita” (2002), non-fiction collections “Creative writing for young women” (1999) and “Culture of the offended” (2003) and some other books. In 2018 she was awarded with Julian Tuwim Prize for life achievement
In our residence Izabela Morska in April 2022 was finishing her new novel in which one of the main characters is of Latvian origin.
We deal mostly with present day poetry and nonmainstream prose. Our editions are printed in limited amount of copies for circulating mainly in Baltic countries, Russia, Ukraine and other Post-soviet states.
Our series of original Russian books follows the pattern of the book supplement to Vozdukh poetry magazine (started in 2005) in representing actual Russian writing as a multidimensional variety of poetical languages.
Our books of translations are focused mostly at powerful authorial personalities carrying on a distinct message of his/her national culture comprehensible even in translation.
Russian books
Translations
Latvian books
We are ready to cooperate with national and international institutions and media interested in supporting innovative writing in different languages.
© Literature Without Borders (Latvia), 2016
