Elīna Zālīte (1898–1955) was a poet, playwright, writer and translator. She was born into a family of artisans. As she was frequently ill in her childhood, she did not complete secondary school, though she later worked as a teacher in Alūksne. It was her bad health which first motivated her to start writing. Zālīte’s literary career began in her twenties, when she was working on translations from Estonian and Finnish, and it culminated with her Latvian translation of the Estonian epic “Kalevipoeg”. Later she also translated from Russian, French, German, and Swedish. Zālīte made her literary debut with poetry, though there was a long gap between her first publications and her debut poetry collection Sila ziedi (Pine Forest Blossoms) in 1931. This collection was immensely popular in the 1930s, which allowed her to devote more of her time to writing. In the 1920s and 1930s, Zālīte wrote several plays and worked as a playwright at the Daile Theatre. Her only novel, Agrā rūsa (Early Rust), was written during the Second World War. In 1979, it was adapted for the cinema and became one of the most watched films in the Soviet Union. After the Second World War, Zālīte was forced to align her work with the Socialist realist canon and consequently several of her works – including Agrā rūsa – were changed.