Uldis Balodis grew up in Arizona, a descendant of the World War II Latvian refugee community in the United States, and is a native speaker of Latvian and English. Languages have fascinated him his entire life and he has studied over thirty, including Navajo, Sanskrit, and Sámi. He holds a PhD in linguistics and has a particular interest in endangered and less spoken languages.
As a translator, he has worked with a variety of literary genres, both fiction and nonfiction. His translation of Zigmunds Skujiņš’s novel Nakedness (Vagabond Voices) will be published in 2018, as well as Trillium (Līvõ Kultūr sidām, Liiviläisten ystävät ry), for which he was a contributing translator, and which will be the first ever poetry anthology in English and Livonian, an endangered Finnic language native to Latvia.
