Jūrmala is a sea resort city in Latvia, breathing under pine umbrellas on a stretch of land between river Lielupe and the Baltic Sea. In 2018 I have opened Sea Library here in Jūrmala. Come and look!
I live; I die; the sea comes over me; it's the blue that lasts.
Virginia Woolf
“Walking by the sea is one of my favourite activities – sounds, colours, smells and temper, always different, always changing, affect me. I’m meditative, exhilarated, reflective, creative. It makes me feel how comforting the change could be.” Elina Ruka
As a companion piece to the first of our essays by Anna Iltnere about literary seaside houses – Shruff End from “The Sea, The Sea” by Iris Murdoch – we present an interview with Miles Leeson, lead editor of the Iris Murdoch Review.
In the first of a new series of essays on seaside houses from literature, Anna Iltnere, founder of the Sea Library on Latvia’s Baltic shore, takes us to Shruff End from Iris Murdoch’s novel “The Sea, The Sea”. Each essay will be about a different house, illustrated by the artist Katrina Gelze.
“Afloat on the afterglow of forbidden energy, texting the celestial canopy above. To sleep on the sea I return to a primeval cradle, a place to rest, not to think, but absorb. Transmuted in dreams I become the ocean.” Angela Cockayne
Eight new books on winter shores: seas, oceans, tides, waves and islands. Coming out in January and February 2020!
My interview with English writer Philip Marsden, author of “The Summer Isles: A Voyage of the Imagination”, published in 2019 by Granta and available in the Sea Library.
