The life of Rute is prosperous, but it is filled with an emptiness made more and more intolerable by memories of her harsh childhood, longing for a long-lost sister, painful thoughts about a mother in prison and an inability to open up to (the) people closest to her, her husband included. Rute never knew her father, but when he dies leaving her an inheritance of a country house by the river, she escapes – escapes from the city, from people, from herself. She needs not only to escape, but to try and learn to live with the pain caused by her sister’s disappearance – a pain that she has lived with for 10 years. Living in her father’s country house on the riverbank, she gets to know her neighbours, but, most of all, she gets to know the river … a river that becomes her symbolic sister.
This project has been funded with support from the Creative Europe Programme of the European Commission.
Laura Vinogradova, born in 1984, is a Latvian writer of children and adult literature. She studied business management at Riga Technical University and did not start writing until she was 30. Her first published book was a story for children, Snīpulītis no Snīpuļciema (Baby Long Nose from the Long Nose Village, 2017), followed immediately by two collections of short stories: izelpas (exhalations, 2018) and Lāču kalns (Bear Hill, 2018). In 2019, she published a book for children in two volumes, called Mežpasakas (Tales of the Forest).
Her latest book, Upe (The River, 2020), has been shortlisted for the Annual Latvian Literature Award and received the European Union Prize for Literature 2021.
Laura currently lives in Riga and works at the Museum of Literature and Music.
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