Aivars Ozoliņš
Biography
Writer and journalist Aivars Ozoliņš (1957) studied at the Faculty of Foreign Languages at the University of Latvia. Renowned as one of the first Latvian postmodern writers, he made his debut in the late 1980s with a novella entitled Almost a Hundred (Gandrīz simts, 1989). His seminal work is the book Dukts (1991), a cult classic of Latvian postmodernism fiction, which had clear intentions to cast doubt on the entire purpose of fiction and writing. Dukts consists of several unconnected stories, varying in style and length, but all of an experimental nature, full of wordplay, puns, parody and references to other texts in the same vein as the work of Daniil Kharms and Donald Barthelme. The most popular is the titular story – a humorous and absurd parody about what is described as an eponymous mythical “game of gods that everyone can play.” Ozoliņš quit writing soon after the publication of Dukts and became a well-known political commentator. His works have been translated in Russian, English and Swedish.
Bibliography
Dukts. Riga: Liesma, 1991; Jumava, 2014.
Sapnīši un Gandrīz simts [Dreams and Almost Hundred] (Dreams by Eva Rubene). Riga: Zinātne, 1989.
Articles
Reviews
Guntis Berelis, Kā atrast ideālo valodu? Ceļā uz Duktu, review of Dukts // Guntis Berelis blog, 1993 [LV]
Guntis Berelis, review of Dukts // Guntis Berelis blog, 1992 [LV]
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