Janis Grants

(pseudonym of Jāms Jēkabsons). Born June 3 (16), 1909, near Riga; died Dec. 4, 1970, in Jurmala. Soviet Latvian writer. Member of the CPSU from 1943. Born into a fisherman’s family. Participated in the workers’ movement in bourgeois Latvia.

In his stories of 1940 and 1941, Grants described the difficult living conditions of poor fishermen and longshoremen and their struggle for Soviet power. He participated in the Great Patriotic War (1941–45). His collections of war stories include At the Sources of a Brook (1945), Defense of a Village on a Hill (1947), and Front-line Stories (1948). He published the novel Moscow Is Behind Us in 1954. The life of fishermen is the subject of the tale In the Wind (1949) and the novels The Blue Expanse Is Rumbling (1959; State Prize of the Latvian SSR, 1960), Dawn on the Island of Winds (1962), and A Blue Flame Shimmers (1968). A collection of short stories. Dock Commander came out in 1965. Grants was awarded two orders, as well as medals.