Akvilina Cicėnaitė is a writer and a literary translator. Having grown up in Vilnius, she graduated with an MA in Literary Theory and worked as a copywriter in advertising agencies before moving to the other side of the world. She obtained a PhD in Religious Studies in New Zealand and has been living in Sydney, Australia, since 2012. She has published nine books, including six novels for young adults, and won multiple awards for her work.

       Tylos istorija (A History of Silence). Vilnius: Alma littera, 2017. – 271 p. English sample translation available

It is a moving women’s saga, told in an empathetic way, depicting the fate of one family’s four generations of women from one family – Elžbieta, Veronika, Teresa and Nika. Bound together for life by blood, they inevitably share similar inner attitudes, loves and sins, and above all, telling silences. In the novel’s three parts, Cicėnaitė unpacks different notions of silence: silence as the language of love and life (Elžbieta and Aurelianas), silence as the alphabet of death (Veronika, Augustinas and Teresa), silence as an attempt to protect and forget, as a veil covering 20th century history’s  abysses and crimes against humanity (a subtly personalised trace of the Holocaust). And although the scripts of the characters’ lives and happinesses are different, they face confronting the meaning of life as a reconciliation with the past, where the novel’s most important questions emerge: to what extent are there silence and silences in every family that has survived the 20th century? How many unhappy people are around us, living and doing things not out of love but following all the musts and ceaselessly trying to please others but not themselves.

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       Anglų kalbos žodynas (A Dictionary of the English Language). Vilnius: Alma littera, 2022. – 317 p. English sample translation available

A dictionary, a road novel, autofiction, a reflection on contemporaneity and a CV of the present – such is the multidimensionality of this novel by Akvilina Cicėnaitė. A subtle, meditative, sensitive and personal narrative about migration, memory, longing and melancholy, the never-ending search for a sense of home, solastalgia and nostalgia, writing and translation, the word and the world, the woman and the man. Travelling from Sydney to Broken Hill with her spouse, the narrator ploughs not only through the Australian landscape but also through the mines of her own memory, where the stories unearthed are structured by her personal 26-word dictionary of English. What does it mean for a northern European woman from Vilnius married to a French-speaking Canadian to live in Sydney? Why does living in English feel different from living in Lithuanian? And why is a non-native English tongue so deceptively (un)simple? How does another language shape our identity and memories, and why does speaking it serve as a constant painful reminder that the North is indelible? Untranslatability – of experiences, feelings, the past, womanhood – is one of the novel’s core thematic threads, as is the search for a unique vocabulary, realising full well that married life is nothing other than the creation of a common vocabulary.

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Awards

2022: A Dictionary of the English Language awarded the Book of the Year Prize (Lithuania)

Selected translations

Polish: Słownik języka angielskiego. Translated by Agnieszka Rembiałkowska. Gdańsk: Marpress, 2024

Contact for inquiries: kotryna.pranckunaite@lithuanianculture.lt