Birutė Jonuškaitė | Lithuania

Birutė Jonuškaitė was born into a Lithuanian family in the Sejny region. She is a poet, prose writer, essayist, and translator. A graduate of journalism at Vilnius University, she writes novels, short stories, and poetry, and translates Polish literature into Lithuanian. She has translated contemporary Polish poetry as well as prose by Hanna Krall, Jacek Dehnel, Magdalena Tulli, Jerzy Rudnicki, Marta Guśniowska, Janusz Korczak, Małgorzata Duszka, and Beata Gruszka-Zych, among others.

A long-time president of the Lithuanian Writers’ Union, she was one of the first scholars in independent Lithuania to study the work of Czesław Miłosz. Jonuškaitė has received numerous literary and cultural awards. In 2006, she was honoured with the Witold Hulewicz Award for bringing Polish and Lithuanian literatures closer together and received Poland’s Gold Cross of Merit. In 2020, she was awarded the Baltic Assembly Prize for Literature, and in 2025 she received the Lithuanian Order of Merit Medal for her exceptional mastery of the Lithuanian language and her artistic portrayal of the people of her native region.

Her stories and poems have been translated into English, Polish, Georgian, Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, German, Spanish, French, Slovak, Slovenian, Greek, Czech, and Croatian. In Poland, her works include the poetry collection The Child with Grey Eyes (2004) and the novels Maranta (2020) and Maestro (2022).