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Acceptance Speech for the Most Creative Book of the Year, 2025 given by the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore   First, I am grateful to the community of literary scholars and writers (who are so closely intertwined in our country that, I think, I will not be mistaken in addressing you in this way) […]

In the Soviet period, the most dominant allusion to Paris in Lithuanian literature was Salomėja Nėris’s painful and socially charged poem “Dvi dešimti sū”(“For Only Twenty Sous,” 1937). Although Liūnė Janušytė’s novel Korektūros klaida (A Mistake of Proofreading) and Antanas Vienuolis’s Laiškai iš Paryžiaus (Letters from Paris) were also published around the same time, for

During the long oppressive decades of the Soviet occupation, the editors of the underground journal, The Chronicle of the Catholic Church of Lithuania, pledged to publish testimonies of human rights abuses until freedom of speech was restored in Lithuania. Despite arrests, incarceration, deportation to Siberia, and the murders of its editorial staff, The Chronicle, (Kronika in Lithuanian, as

The three authors discussed in this review can hardly be introduced as young or debut writers: Mindaugas Kirka, Solveiga Masteikaitė, and Ramūnas Liutkevičius were well-known in artist circles before they had published any poetry books. These three poetry debuts are a hopeful gesture, as more artists who do not belong to the “young artist group”

In the rain forests of Borneo, observing orangutans in their natural habitat for half a century, Dr. Birutė Galdikas absorbed an important lesson: “Without spirituality your research will not work.” She discovered the truth of spiritual forces in the jungle. “We humans are not primates, we are monkeys,” she continued. “Our success is because we

I I hadn’t been back to Alaska for thirty years, not since 1991, when my Uncle Ray and I hiked up Mt. Marathon in his hometown of Seward. The only people I knew who had been to Alaska had driven there. They drove old cars or vans on the Alcan highway through the remote mountain

I was nervous about meeting my old school friend, Greta. I had not seen her since 1988, when I’d spent a few days with her at the Lithuanian Gymnasium in Germany before flying to Moscow, and then to Vilnius. In the late eighties and early nineties, diaspora Lithuanians had the chance to meet their Lithuanian

As I write, Lithuania ranks first in the world as the country worst affected by coronavirus. These numbers hurt the most when we lose someone dear to us. On December 11, 2020, just before noon, my friend and mentor, Dr. Irena Veisaitė, died in Vilnius from complications from Covid-19 and pneumonia. Irena was 92. The

It is a pleasure and a privilege to be here this evening, participating in the Australian launch of Lidija Šimkutė’s new book, Mintis ir uola / Thought and Rock. The book is published in Lithuania and earlier this year there was a parallel launch in Vilnius. I speak of Lithuania as a far-off land. That may be true,

A few minutes shy of 10:00 pm, I rolled into the parking lot of Hotel Aviv in Dresden, after thirteen hours of driving from Lithuania, through Poland, and into East Germany, the former DDR. At the reception desk, I made the linguistic shift to German from Lithuanian, before that English in the United States, and