Tomas Venclova was born in 1937 in Klaipeda, Lithuania. After graduating from Vilnius University, he travelled in the Eastern Bloc, where he met and translated Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak. Venclova took part in the Lithuanian and Soviet dissident movements, making friends with Natalia Gorbanevskaya and Lyudmila Alexeyeva and other members of the literary and human rights underground. He made his living by translating Baudelaire, Saint-John Perse, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden, Robert Frost, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam and many others into Lithuanian. Venclova was one of the five founding members of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group. His activities led to a ban on publishing, exile and the stripping of his Soviet citizenship in 1977. Venclova is Emeritus Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University where he taught from 1985. He has been the recipient of numerous prizes including the Vilenica 1990 International Literary Prize, the Lithuanian National Prize in 2000, the 2002 Prize of Two Nations, which he received jointly with Czeslaw Milosz, the 2005 Jotvingiai Prize, and the 2005 New Culture of New Europe Prize, and the 2023 Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award. His works include volumes of poetry, essays, literary biography, conversations and works on Vilnius. His poetry has been translated into English in books including Winter Dialogue (Northwestern University Press, 1997), and two retrospective editions with no overlap between them, The Junction: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008) and The Grove of the Eumenides: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2025). Magnetic North: Conversations with Tomas Venclova by Ellen Hinsey was published by University of Rochester Press and Boydell & Brewer in 2017. After many years in New Haven, Connecticut, and a period spent in Kraków, he returned to Lithuania and now lives in Vilnius. Ellen Hinsey (editor & co-translator) has published ten books of poetry, essays, dialogue and literary translation, with a focus on Eastern Europe and democracy. Her poetry collections include The Invisible Fugue (Wildhouse Poetry, USA, 2023); Update on the Descent (Bloodaxe Books, 2009), a 2007 National Poetry Series Finalist; The White Fire of Time (Wesleyan University Press, USA, 2002; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2003); and Cities of Memory (1996), winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award. A former Berlin Prize Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, she has been the recipient of Lannan and Rona Jaffe Foundation Awards, among others. Born in Massachusetts and long resident in Paris, she was educated at Tufts University in the US and at the University of Paris, and has French and American nationality. Diana Senechal (co-translator) was born in Tucson and holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale University. Her selected translations of Tomas Venclova, Winter Dialogue, first appeared with Northwestern University Press in 1997, and a selection of these were republished in The Junction: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008). From 2011 to 2016 she taught, advised, and led the philosophy program at Columbia Secondary School, before moving to Hungary. Rimas Uzgiris (co-translator) is a Lithuanian poet, translator, editor and critic. His many translations include Then What: Selected Poems by Gintaras Grajauskas (Bloodaxe Books, 2018). He holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers-Newark University, and teaches translation at Vilnius University. He has received a Fulbright Scholar Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship, and the Poetry Spring 2016 Award for his translations of Lithuanian poetry into other languages.
