Monday, March 30, 2009

LITHUMANIA!









The poets featured in NEP:

Gintaras Grajauskas (born in1966) is a poet, essayist, prose writer and a dramatist. He is considered to be the best author of ironic and prosaic poetry about contemporary life.

He studied at a music school and at the Jazz Department of the Klaipėda faculty of the Lithuanian Conservatory of Music. He worked for radio and TV editorial offices and since 1996 has been compiling the literary publication Gintaro lašai (Amber Drops). He sings and plays guitar in the band Rokfeleriai.

Grajauskas’ poetry tells seemingly irrelevant, even trivial stories about the present day and the mundane. However, the triviality in Grajauskas’ poetry is not easy to understand: irony and humour prevails over spiritual shallowness and ennui thus revealing a different perspective of the world. This ambivalence is one of the reasons why Grajauskas’ poetry is so popular. The life of an individual is ambiguous – tragic and comical, repulsive and attractive at the same time.

Aha! 




Marius Burokas (b. 1977 in Vilnius) is a poet, translator, and literary critic. He matriculated at Vilnius University in 1995 to study Lithuanian language and literature

He has worked as a Lithuanian language teacher, has served as project editor for a public relations agency, and has coordinated literary programmes at the Eastern Lithuanian Cultural Centre. He has translated short stories and a novel by Charles Bukowski as well as poetry by Craig Czury. He currently works at an advertising agency.
Burokas made has debut with the poetry collection Ideograms (Ideogramos) in 1999. His second book of poetry, States of Being (Būsenos), appeared in 2005.
The writer lives and works in Vilnius.
from the horse's mouth:

Most often a single line appears in my head, and little by little it becomes a poem. When it's necessary to release these thoughts from my head, I have to run and write them down somewhere since, unlike some other poets, I don't have a notebook or even a pen.
I often write poems in strange places and under strange conditions. They often appear when I'm incredibly bored.




Daiva Čepauskaitė (born in 1967) is a poet and dramatist. Her works combine (auto) irony and the sharpness of the tongue with lyricism, and the merciless world of today is portrayed with humour.

Čepauskaitė has a medical doctor's diploma, but has never worked as a doctor. While a student of medicine, she also studied stage art at the Youth Musical Study. Since 1990 she has worked as an actress in the Kaunas Youth Chamber Theatre. In the Kaunas State Drama Theatre she has played a role in Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra. She has been writing since her early youth, so, according to herself, she came to poetry "unawares". In 2005 she was declared winner of the 41st "Spring of Poetry" festival.



Neringa Abrutytė (born in 1972) is a poet who introduced into Lithuanian poetry provocative subjects and styles of expressions characteristic of ingenious syntactic experiments that help create a unique rhythm, intonation and open several possibilities of interpreting the same text.

She studied Lithuanian language and literature at Vilnius University and has worked as editor and teacher. Currently she lives in Denmark.

In her poems Abrutytė openly speaks about the emotions of forbidden love for an older man, contempt to parents and her desire to reach the heights of poetry. Her poems seem as if they have been clipped out of a small girl's/woman's diary that is all about everyday experiences. Without exaggerated significance she describes her love or erotic experiences, childhood memories and the search for her proper place in European cities. The author imitates a teenage style of writing by using abbreviations usually found in students' notes, snippets of the jargon, plays with her name or biographic detail thus creating the impression of shocking sincerity. Everyday intonations reinforce the impression of intense, emotionally fragmented and therefore authentic speech.



Eugenijus Ališanka (b. 1960 in Barnaul, Russia) is a poet, essayist and translator. Following his graduation from Vilnius University with a degree in mathematics, he worked for the Culture and Art Institute of Lithuania and then, from 1994-2002, as a director of international programmes in the Lithuanian Writers' Union and a director of an international poetry festival 'Spring of Poetry'. Since 2003 he has been working as editor-in-chief of the magazine Vilnius, published in English as The Vilnius Review. Ališanka is a member of the Lithuanian Writers' Union's Board and of PEN.

here: have some more Alisanka poems! yum!

Laurynas Katkus (b. 1972 in Vilnius) is a poet and translator. He studied Lithuanian philology at Vilnius University and comparative literature at Vilnius and Leipzig Universities. He has worked in radio and publishing. He made his debut in 1998 with Voices and Notes (Balsai, rašteliai), a book of poetry.
Translations of his poetry have been published by American, German, Slovenian, Polish, and Latvian literary publishers; English and German translations of his book appeared in 2001 and 2003, respectively. His second Lithuanian-language book of poetry, Diving Lessons (Nardymo pamokos), appeared in 2003 and demonstrated the author's maturity. Katkus has translated works by Friedrich Hölderlin, Gottfried Benn, Walter Benjamin, Peter Handke, Susan Sontag, and other authors into Lithuanian.
He lives in Vilnius.

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