Norway has won this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, gaining the right to host next year’s competition. Belarus-born performer Alexander Rybak and the song “Fairytale” earned an amazing 387 points.

Eurovision this year was held in Moscow. A total of 25 countries, including Estonia and Lithuania, competed in the May 16 final in Olimpisky Indoor Arena.

Latvia’s Intars Busulis, who decided to sing the song “Sastrēgums” in Russian rather than Latvian, failed to make it out of the semi-finals held May 14-15. The song, with music by Kārlis Lācis and lyrics by poet Jānis Elsbergs, was turned into “Probka.”

Norway walked away with the contest. Really, it killed, setting a new record for total points. As voting results were announced from the 42 countries participating in Eurovision, the real battle was for second place. Iceland and Azerbaijan exchanged spots at least a couple of times, but in the end the island nation took second with 218 points.

Estonia’s Urban Symphony held up honorably, earning 129 points and sixth place.

A tourist guide to Latvia’s capital city, written by Rīga Vice Mayor Andris Ārgalis and available in nine languages, has been released by the publishing house Nacionālais apgāds.

“In writing this book,” Ārgalis said in a May 1 press release announcing release of Rīga, “I wanted to draw the attention of Rīga residents and city guests to the interesting details of Rīga’s splendid buildings—towers, attics, facades, cornices, ornaments, balconies, Rīga’s lions and angels.”

Among the approximately 40 areas of the city examined in the book are the Dome Square, St. Peter’s Church, the Esplanade, and several parks and boulevards.

The book is available in Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Latvian, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.

Zinta Aistars, a Latvian-American writer and editor-in-chief for The Smoking Poet, talks to author Agate Nesaule for the online publication’s spring issue.

Nesaule, the award-winning author of the 1995 memoir A Woman in Amber, in March saw the release of her first novel, In Love with Jerzy Kosinski.

Although the two books are similar, Nesaule explains to Aistars what separates the novel from the memoir:

I have always been aware of and fascinated by the complex interplay of memory and memoir, memoir and fiction, truth and lies, and it is really this interplay that led me to In Love. I had experiences, emotions, and dreams which I did not want to include in a memoir; I wanted to play with them and change them; I wanted to find fictional equivalents far removed from any actual events; and I wanted to imagine what was plausible but would never happen. I also wanted to preserve the authenticity of feeling that I was able to bring to A Woman in Amber. In short, I wanted to write a novel.

The interview also examines why Nesaule chose a Polish writer, rather than a Latvian, as a hero for her novel; the feminism of Anna Dūja, the lead character of In Love with Jerzy Kosinski; and the strong reaction she received to A Woman in Amber.

Learn more about Aistars on her Web site, www.zintaaistars.com, or her blog, zintaaistars.blogspot.com.