Gintaras Grajauskas (b. 1966) is a poet, prose writer, playwright and musician. After graduating from a preparatory music school, he studied jazz at the Klaipėda Faculty of the Lithuanian State Conservatoire. Since 1994 he has been working at the daily newspaper Klaipėda, and since 1996 has been editing its literary supplement Gintaro lašai (Drops of Amber). He also sings and plays bass with the group Kontrabanda. 

Grajauskas’s literary debut, a book of poems entitled Tatuiruotė (Tattoo), was published in 1993 and won the Zigmas Gėlė award for the best literary debut of the year. In 2007 he received the Golden Scene Cross for the play Mergaitė, kurios bijojo Dievas (A Girl whom God was Afraid of). His works have been translated into English, German, Swedish, Polish and Italian along with other languages. 

Grajauskas’s poetry is characterised by its musicality and use of plots – often his poems read like short stories with individual characters, while the speaker is merely an observer. For instance, in the collection Katalogas (Catalogue, 1997), the narrator observes his environment, “cataloguing” banal everyday objects, events and people he encounters. Grajauskas inventively combines registers of different genres – lyrical, comic, parabolic. The structure of an anecdote is creatively transformed: the poems are usually short, the phrases laconic and the language colloquial, with an ironic transformation showing up in the last line, taking the reader by surprise and making them laugh. 

Selected translations

English: Then What: Selected Poems. Translated by Rimas Uzgiris. Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2018

Ukrainian: Апостол низьких частот. Traslated by Marianna Kijanovska. Ternopil: Krok, 2016

Italian: Barricate quotidiane. Translated by Pietro U. Dini. Nove Ligure: Edizioni Joker, 2008

Polish: Przegrany Grajewski. Translated by Alicja Rybałko. Lodz: Fundacja Anima, 2003

German: Knochenflöte. Translated by Mala Vikaite, Viktor Kalinke. Leipzig: Edition Erata, 2003

Swedish: Benflöjt. Translated by Anna Harrison, Mikael Nydahl, Carina Nynäs, Liana Ruokytė. Sätaröd: Ariel Skrifter, 2002

Translations on-line: www.lyrikline.org/en/authors/gintaras-grajauskas