Birutė Jonuškaitė (Lithuania)

Birutė Jonuškaitė was born in 1959 in Sejny County, Poland. She graduated from Vilnius University with a degree in journalism. She worked as a journalist, was editor-in-chief of the magazine Šeima (Family), and has been the chair of the Lithuanian Writers’ Union since 2018. She has published five collections of short stories, three essay collections, seven novels, two books of poetry and a book for children. She has also translated 39 books from Polish. She is the winner of more than ten literary awards; the novel Maranta (2015) won the Dovydėnas Prize for the best Lithuanian novel of the year, and its Polish edition (translated by Agnieszka Rembiałkowska) was a finalist for the Gdynia Literature Prize in 2021. She was awarded the Culture and Art Prize of the Government of the Republic of Lithuania and the Golden Cross of the President of the Republic of Poland for special merits in developing Polish-Lithuanian cultural relations. In 2020, she was awarded the Baltic Assembly Prize for recent work.