Uldis Bērziņš
Uldis Bērziņš (17 May 1944 – 24 March 2021) was a Latvian poet and translator. Biography. He studied Latvian philology at the University of Latvia and published his first collection of poetry in 1980. Bērziņš studied Turkish in Leningrad University Oriental Studies Department (from 1968 to 1971), and also studied in the Asian and African Studies section of Moscow State University (concentrating on Persian and Turkish), at Tashkent State University (Uzbek), Reykjavik University (Icelandic), as well as in Czechoslovakia, Sweden and other countries. Bērziņš took part in the international Bible translation seminar at the Amsterdam Open University and Lund  University forum over questions regarding Koran translations. From 2002 on he taught Turkish at the Modern Languages Department of the University of Latvia. Bērziņš' poetry has been translated into German, Swedish, Estonian and Lithuanian. In 2009, Bērziņš finished the translation of Quran into Latvian, an enormous work that took him fifteen years. He remembered with fondness the half year he spent working in an Istanbul library. During his work, he was also in correspondence with numerous specialists of the Quran and Islam. Bērziņš received various awards and honours such as the Order of the Three Stars (1995), the Zinaida Lazda  award (1994), the Baltic Assembly Prize for Literature, the Arts and Science (1995) and the Spidola Award (2000). In 2009 and again in 2010, he was named one of the World's 500 most influential Muslims in survey conducted by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center (though Bērziņš was actually Lutheran). Bērziņš translated from Polish, Russian, Old Icelandic, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Persian, Ancient Hebrew and Arabic; he also knew Ivrit (Modern Hebrew), Tatar and Chuvash.