Mara Zalite was born in 1952 in Krasnoyarsk in Siberia, in a Latvian family deported to Siberia by the Soviet regime. In 1956 her family returned to Latvia. She has won various literary awards, among them the prestigious J. G. Herder Prize (1993) and the Best Novel of 2013 for Five Fingers (Pieci pirksti). Her books have been translated into German, Russian, English, Estonian, Swedish and other languages.