Venezuelan Latvian author Lorena Briedis weaves family history between Caracas and Latvia into her novels

On Sunday, August 9, the Rakstivāls literary festival in Līgatne will host Lorena Briedis, head of the European Association of Creative Writing Programmes (EACWP), who was born in Venezuela to a Latvian family and now lives in Spain. She will speak about her years-long work on a four-book novel cycle that draws heavily on her own family's story.

From Jelgava to Caracas

Lorena's grandparents fled Soviet occupation, leaving behind a farm in Jelgava, and after a stop in Germany eventually settled in Venezuela, where relatives had already established themselves and encouraged them to follow. There the family built a successful plastics packaging business and lived for more than 60 years. Conditions began to deteriorate under Hugo Chávez's rule. At age 90, Lorena's grandmother Astrīda decided to return to Latvia and moved to Riga, where she died in 2022; other family ancestors buried in Germany were later reburied in Latvia alongside her.

From letters to novels

Lorena studied journalism and communication in Caracas and later storytelling in Madrid, where she has worked in literature since 2010 and has earned her living teaching literature for more than 16 years. Since 2013 she has been writing, in Spanish, a four-novel cycle titled "Dreamers Awake. A Sacred Tragedy," following a protagonist named Ophelia whose journey moves between tropical settings and the Baltic. In the third volume, Ophelia travels from the Caribbean to Riga, where composer Richard Wagner also appears in the narrative.

One volume is currently being considered by a Spanish publishing house, and its first chapter has already been translated into Latvian — the first language into which Lorena's work has been translated.