Karlis Verdins

Kārlis Vērdiņš was born in 1979 in Riga. With an M.A. in Cultural Theory and a Ph.D. in Philology, Verdins is the author of many academic papers, including a book on prose poetry "The social and political dimensions of the Latvian prose poem" (2010) and essays on literature, both Latvian and foreign, as well as a prolific literary critic. He has published four volumes of poetry in Latvian. Vērdiņš has also written librettos and song lyrics and has published translations of European and American poetry (T. S. Eliot, Joseph Brodsky, Charles Simic, Walt Whitman, W. B. Yeats, Konstantin Biebl, Georg Trakl, Lev Rubinstein et al). His own poetry has been translated in many languages, including collections in Russian, Polish and Czech as well as a selection in English, "Come to Me", published in 2015.