Judita Vaičiūnaitė

Judita Vaičiūnaitė was born in 1937 in Kaunas, Lithuania.[4][5] Her father was a professor of psychiatry, and her mother was a nurse. She was particularly close with her sister Dalia.[4]

After World War II, she moved to Vilnius with her family.[3] There, she studied at Vilnius University, graduating in 1959.[6] Vaičiūnaitė would live in Vilnus for the rest of her life, making the city a central subject of her work.[1][4]

Vaičiūnaitė's first poetry collection, Pavasario akvarelės ("Spring Watercolors"), was published in 1960.[2] She went on to publish new collections frequently, producing more than 20 books of poetry.[2][6] She also wrote fairy tales and poems for children.[2][4]

Vaičiūnaitė worked as an editor for several literary journals in Lithuania.[6] She also completed translations of other poets into Lithuanian, notably the work of Anna Akhmatova.[7][8] In 1978, she was named the laureate of the Lithuanian Poetry Spring festival.[4]

In 1996, she was awarded the Baltic Assembly Prize for Literature, the Arts and Science for her collection Žemynos vainikai ("Wreaths of Zemyna").[4] That year, she published the memoir Vaikystės veidrody, a series of essays about her own life.[4][9] She was issued the Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas in 1997, and the Lithuanian Writers' Union Prize in 2000.[6]

Vaičiūnaitė's poetry dealt with a wide range of subjects and themes, including Lithuanian and Greek mythology, modern jazz, history, and contemporary city life.[1][3][10] Her urban-centered poetry, frequently set in Vilnius' Old Town, is perhaps her best known.[1][2] It came at a time when most other Lithuanian poets were from the countryside and focused on the natural world in their work.[11][12] She also incorporated the city's multicultural history into her poems.[3][13]

She frequently employed dramatic monologue in her work, often from the point of view of female historical and mythological figures.[1][13] Her poetry was influenced by the neo-romantic work of Salomėja Nėris, the first prominent Lithuanian woman poet.[14] Alongside Marcelijus Martinaitis, Sigitas Geda, and others, she was part of a generation that quietly revolutionized Lithuanian poetry as dissatisfaction grew with Soviet rule, but the neo-romantic strains persisted.[3][4][13][9]

Vaičiūnaitė was a highly independent single mother, but she was also convinced of the importance of romantic love. She wrote with a feminist realism, narrating the lives of single women in the city.[4][3][11]

Judita Vaičiūnaitė died in Vilnius in 2001.[4][5][15] A 2010 posthumous collection of selections from her work, Kristalas: Poezijos Rinktinė, was published by the Lithuanian Writers' Union.[6][13] In 2018, a collection of her work in English translation was published as Vagabond Sun: Selected Poems.[3]

A monument to her stands near the Church of St. Catherine in Vilnius.[4]