Baiba Damberga

Baiba Damberga (1957) is a poet, artist, and an active member of the Livonian culture scene. She graduated from the Art Academy of Latvia Department of Graphic Art in 1982 and now teaches at the Jānis Rozentāls Rīga Art School. Damberga is a member of the “Etching Guild”. She has participated in various exhibitions in Latvia and abroad, has organised 15 solo exhibitions in Latvia, Estonia and Finland, worked as a curator and graphic designer. She has written about Livonian art scene in Lībieši. Vēsture, valoda un kultūra [Livonians. History, Language and Culture]. Damberga writes poetry in Latvian, Livonian and Tamian dialect (one of the three main dialects of the Latvian language), as well as humorous sketches in Tamian dialect. Her poems have been published in Livonian newspaper “Līvli” in the early 1990s, collection of poems Es viltīgāks par tevi, menca! [I’m More Cunning Than You, Cod!] (1998), anthology of poems Kā iznirst lībieši [Livonian Emergence] (2011). In collaboration with Valts Ernštreits and Karl Pajusalu, Baiba Damberga published the bilingual (Livonian and English) collection of poems Trillium in 2018, receiving the Annual Latvian Literature Special Achievement Award in 2019. Some of Damberga’s poems from Trillium were published in a literary magazine Modern Poetry in Translation in the United Kingdom.