Petras Cvirka was born in 1909 in the village of Klangiai, not far from Kaunas, Lithuania, into a poor farming family. He first studied at an art school in Kaunas before heading to France to study French language and literature. He published a collection of poems at the age of 19, and his first novel, Frank Kruk (1934), at 25. In the twelve years remaining to him, he produced two more novels, six short story collections, several books for children, and numerous newspaper articles. He was a founder of the journal of the left-wing group The Third Front and one of its leading members. In 1940, he was accepted into the Communist Party and selected a deputy of the Lithuanian Supreme Council. From 1940 to 1942, he was the director of the organizing committee of the Lithuanian Soviet Writers' Union, serving as its chairman from 1944 on. He was extremely active in promoting translations of Lithuanian literature into Russian and other languages and wrote regularly for Soviet newspapers as well as Lithuanian ones. He died in 1947, and was widely lionized in Soviet Lithuania; there was a postage stamp was issued in honor of his 50th birthday in 1959 (he hadn't lived to see his 40th), a documentary film, scholarly monographs, numerous editions of his works, and translations into many languages all over the Soviet Empire.
Elizabeth Novickas is a translator and critic, a graduate of the University of Illinois, with a B.A. in Rhetoric from the Urbana campus and a M.A. in Lithuanian Language and Literature from the Chicago campus. She has worked previously as a bookbinder and fine printer in Urbana, Illinois; as a newspaper designer and cartographer in Springfield, Illinois; and as editorial system administrator at the Chicago Sun-Times. Besides translating Lithuanian into English, she has worked as editor of the journal Lituanus. Elizabeth was the recipient of a 2011 translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for the translation of Frank Kruk (Pica Pica Press, 2016). In the same year, she won the St. Jerome Prize from the Association of Lithuanian Literary Translators.
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