An Evening with Tomas Venclova

He participated in the dissident movement during the Soviet period; in 1977 he emigrated to the United States. Widely considered to be Lithuania’s greatest poet, Venclova is, as Joseph Brodsky points out in his introduction to Venclova’s Winter Dialogue, a poet who “has absorbed all the best to be found in the neighbouring territories”.

He has published over twenty books including volumes of poetry, literary criticism, political commentary, literary biography, translations, and books on Vilnius. His works have been translated into many languages, including by Czesław Miłosz into Polish, and by Joseph Brodsky into Russian. He is active in the contemporary cultural life of Lithuania and is one of Lithuania’s most respected figures.

His books include novels, poetry collections and anthologies, most notably those in Bloodaxe’s Staying Alive anthology series: Staying Alive (2002), Being Alive (2004), Being Human (2011), and Staying Human (2020), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.

Bloodaxe Books has revolutionised poetry publishing in Britain over four decades. Internationally renowned for quality in literature and excellence in book design, it broke new ground by opening up contemporary poetry to thousands of new readers.

Her recent volumes of poetry include Anatomy of the Eclipse (forthcoming, 2026), The Invisible Fugue and The Illegal Age, which was the UK Poetry Book Society’s 2018 Autumn Choice. Hinsey’s essays on dangers to democracy are collected in Mastering the Past: Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and The Rise of Illiberalism. Hinsey’s other books include Update on Descent, The White Fire of Time and Cities of Memory, which received the Yale University Series Award. She collaborated with Tomas Venclova on the book-length dialogue Magnetic North, and has edited and co-translated two volumes of his poetry, The Grove of the Eumenides and The Junction.