[1] Ojārs Vācietis was born on November 13, 1933, in Trapene Parish, Latvia.

Since 1958 he worked in several Latvian magazines and newspapers (for example: Literatūra un Māksla, Liesma, Draugs).

In the 1960s he started to question many official ideological dogmas of the Soviet regime in his poems.

[2] His most famous and still very highly acclaimed translation was Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita in 1979.

Vācietis was married to the Russian poet Ludmila Azarova and their house in Riga, Torņakalns neighborhood has now been transformed into a memorial museum.