Meeting with Ramona Indriksone

At the Andrejs Upīts Memorial Museum in Riga, at 38-4 Brīvības Street, a conversation with Ramona Indriksone will take place on 15 February 2024 at 6:00 p.m.; Rihards Saule will give a musical performance at the event.

Ramona Indriksone is a native of Riga, but has lived in Cēsis since the late 1980s. She studied social care work at the Latvian Christian Academy and completed a master’s degree in social work at Liepāja University. She has been interested in writing since the 1980s. In 1988, she took part in the 88th Young Authors’ Seminar.

Later, while working at a children’s crisis centre, her accumulated experience developed into her first stories, followed by studies in Inga Žolude’s masterclass. Her stories have been published in the periodicals “Domuzīme”, “KonTEKSTS” and “Jaunā Gaita”, and on the websites “Satori” and “Punctum”. Her debut collection, “A Couple of Metres Underwater”, was published in 2019; her first novel, “I Was Someone Else”, was published in 2021; and in 2023, the novel “I Will Take You Home” was published.

At the time, writer Ieva Melgalve said of the story collection “A Couple of Metres Underwater”: “With this book, a courageous author enters Latvian literature—an author who is able to tell even very sad stories warmly, empathetically and with hope.”

These words could also be said of Indriksone’s latest novel, as Inga Grencberga confirms, saying that “this book reveals love in all its breadth. It is both the love that fulfils, makes one yearn and burns with passion, and the love that hurts, betrays, tears everything down to its foundations and restores it to life once again.”

Editor Anda Ogriņa describes Ramona Indriksone’s latest novel as follows: “The novel “I Will Take You Home” is a tango full of suppressed passion, performed in two voices; it is a family saga, somewhat of a detective story, and also a work that reveals, in a stark cross-section, several facets of social problems. The author places the novel’s characters—Adriāna, Zemga, Sāra, Munise and others—under the scrutiny of their Creator with care, yet without any possibility of retreat or compromise, showing human life in all its often painful beauty.”

In October 2023, “Latvian Writers’ Dog Stories” and “Latvian Writers’ Cat Stories” were published by “Zvaigzne ABC”. These are books about various cats and dogs—some that truly lived and others born solely in the imagination. They were created in honour of the beings who have lived alongside us humans for thousands of years. Both books also include stories by Indriksone, alongside those of other writers.

Photographs and video materials will be published online and used in museums’ publicity activities.