Juvenilia

“That spring, as if by agreement, we got it into our heads that something should finally happen, something should change.”

A selection taken from the memoirs of a youth spent growing up in a small town – its fascinations with fads, fashions, slang and bands; its successful/disastrous explorations of personal style and taste; what’s cool, what’s not cool; all pitched at the question and at times painful process of working out who we are in the world.

Author Biography

Virginija Kulvinskaitė-Cibarauskė is a writer, literary critic and scholar, and editor of the review section of the Lithuanian culture magazine ‘Literatūra ir menas’ (Literature and Art). She has been publishing literary reviews since 2010. In 2017, she was awarded a PhD in Philology. She writes fiction – poetry and prose – under the name Virginija Kulvinskaitė. Her first publications of poetry appeared in 2007 and she is now the author of two books: the poetry collection ‘Antrininkė’ (The Double, 2017) and the novel ‘kai aš buvau malalietka’ (when i was a malalietka, 2019, appearing here in extracts as Juvenilia). Her work has been translated into English, German, Russian, Latvian, and Ukrainian. Julija Gulbinovič translates between English, Lithuanian and Croatian, and from Arabic. She has translated Mate Matišić, Dubravka Ugrešić and the Serbian classic Miloš Crnjanski into Lithuanian, and Lithuanian EU Prize for Literature laureate winner, Daina Opolskaitė, into Croatian. In 2017-2018, she was part of the British Council and the Lithuanian Culture Institute’s literary translation mentorship programme and honed her translation skills at the UEA Summer School. She came to literary translation from studies of Lithuanian Philology and Croatian Language at Vilnius University, followed by an MA in Human Geography at Queen Mary University of London. She is also a poet.