The Estonian poet Contra (real name – Margus Konnula) has written fun, delightful poems about school and learning. Beneath the amusing surface of the joke are serious revelations about important values. Contra is a very popular poet in Estonia, the author of almost thirty collections of poems, he has also written texts for performances, prose books for children The great secret of the President, memory and reflection book My Latvia etc. Since Contra learned the Latvian language, he has become a real ambassador of Latvian literature in Estonia, but in Latvia he has received the Amber Sodum Award and the Order of the Three Stars.
The very first Ulla Sarah (Ulla Saar) professionally illustrated book in 2014 was included in the prestigious White Ravens in a catalog compiled by the Munich International Youth Library. Today, she is one of the most popular and versatile contemporary Estonian illustrators, transforming the mood and context of literary works into equivalent and complementary visual works of art.
Guntars Godiņš works enthusiastically and successfully for the benefit of Estonian and Finnish literature, making it an important part of the literary experience of Latvian readers. He greatly helped Contra to become a great translator of Latvian literature and almost a Latvian poet: in 2019 the collection was published It’s so hard to be Latvian, the first part of which is written from Estonian, but the second part was written by Contra in Latvian. Both friends are united by a good sense of humor and joy about language games. Guntars Godins has twice received the International Jānis Baltvilks Prize in Children’s Literature for Andrus Kivirekh (Andrus Kivirähk), but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Latvia and Estonia has been awarded the Language Prize for Kalevdel cooling.
Books Everyone is the smartest translation and publishing in Latvian is part of the publishing house Big and small project Children ‘s Europe, which has received funding from EU programs Creative Europe (sub – program Culture 2014–2020) in the support activity Fiction translation projects. Project Children ‘s Europe intends to translate and publish 9 children’s books from different European languages in two years: Swedish, Estonian, Icelandic, Lithuanian and Finnish.
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