Tomas Venclova

Tomas Venclova was born in Klaipeda, Lithuania, in 1937, and graduated from Vilnius University. He is a scholar, poet, and translator of literature. Because of his outspoken membership in the Lithuanian Helsinki Group, which monitored Soviet violations of human rights, Venclova was threatened with a number of sanctions, and was allowed to emigrate in 1977. Since 1980 he has been a member of the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, from which he also received a PhD. Collections of his poems have been published in English as Dialogue in Winter (1999), and The Junction: Selected Poems (2009). A new selected poems is forthcoming from Bloodaxe Books. Venclova has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Yotvingian Prize in 2005, the Poetry Spring Mairionis Prize in 2017, the Lithuanian National Prize in 2000, and the 2002 Prize of Two Nations, which he received jointly with Czeslaw Milosz. He is professor emeritus at Yale University, and now lives full time in Vilnius.