Akvilina Cicėnaitė (b. 1979) is labelled as a young adult author. She grew up in Vilnius but moved to the other side of the world. She received her PhD in New Zealand and has been living in Australia since 2012. She has two homes but doesn’t identify as an emigrant, because she spends most of her time… in her head, where she creates her stories. “I had to undergo a search for my identity and creativity to understand that geographical coordinates are not as important as the places you carry around in your head, the connections that link one side of the world with another, and that people living on either side are not that different.” Akvilina dreamed of being a writer since childhood, but it was by accident that she found herself in young adult literature. She started her creative career with popular stories for girls, later moving on to problem novels. Her most acclaimed novel is Niujorko respublika (Republic of New York), in which the turbulent life during the first years of the restoration of Lithuanian Independence is seen through the eyes of a teenager. The writer wants the young adult books to be a guide amidst uncertainty and to offer hope. 

Kad mane pamatytum (So That You See Me) – Vilnius: Alma littera, 2020, 188 pp.  

This book takes readers to Lithuania in late 1999 as people are preparing for the predicted apocalypse. But there are many kinds of apocalypses. For fourteen-year-old Gilė, this is a disintegrating relationship with her best friend and family, where the situation keeps getting worse. Her father has a new family and doesn’t care much about the old one, she doesn’t get along with her brother, and her mother, who has been pining for ages, now finds a new man and new life goals and gets immersed in esoterica, so there’s no place for children in her life either. Young Gilė feels so unhappy at home that she decides to run away, equipped only with a little money in her pocket