Photo by R. Tamošaitis

Laura Sintija  Černiauskaitė (born 1976) is the first Lithuanian to receive the European Union Prize for Literature. Her prose is very feminine, deeply psychological, and even Freudian. She portrays people in difficult and unusual emotional situations, and watches them disentangling themselves. She often analyses families, and relationships between men and women; more recently, children take a very prominent part in her cast of characters. However, in her works, painful and difficult experiences are usually for the best, as they inspire, or even force, necessary changes, in order to make her characters better people. In this sense, she is a very optimistic writer, with a strong faith in the human being. She has written three novels and several collections of short prose; she also has published her first collection of poetry; and she is also quite successful as a playwright. Her play “Liučė čiuožia” has been produced in Lithuania. 

Šulinys (The Well), Vilnius: Lithuanian Writers’ Union, 2018., – 192 pp. 

Several years ago, Lithuania was shaken up by a series of similar stories of child murders (or attempted murders) by their family members, and a few of those stories involved wells as the method of either murder or attempt to cover it up. It is hard to say whether these stories triggered or simply coincided with a major public discussion of child protection in Lithuania, culminating in some important laws and reforms. 

Laura Sintija Černiauskaitė readily admits that she was as shaken as the next Lithuanian by these crimes, and that they were the obvious inspiration for her latest novel, which appeared seven years after the previous one. However, it is not some gory true crime writing. Instead, it is a study in love, passion, parenthood, childlike innocence, social cohesion, cruelty and compassion. The well, which does serve in an infanticide, also becomes a Jungian symbol of the unknown, the transcendence, the things that inspire dread and horror. 

Selected translations

Ukrainian: Звiльнiт золоте лоша, Ковзанка. Translated by Beatričė Beliavciv. Kiev: Aneti Antonenko, 2020

Bulgarian: Праговете на Бенедикт. Translated by Antonia Penčeva. Sofia: Panorama, 2013

Дихание към мрамора. Translated by Antonia Penčeva. Sofia: Panorama, 2008