Jurga Ivanauskaitė

Biography

In 1993 the novel “The Witch and the Rain” (Ragana ir lietus) could for a time not be freely sold in Lithuania: it was held to offend the ethical norms of the nation. The Catholic Church in Lithuania condemned the book. The author was thirty-one.

She left for India.

Jurga Ivanauskaitė was born on 14 November 1961 in Vilnius, into an artistic family: her father, Igor Ivanov, was a stage designer and painter, her mother, Ingrida Korsakaitė, an art historian. From 1968 to 1972 she attended Vilnius Secondary School No. 22, in 1978 she printed her first poems in the magazine Moksleivis (“The Schoolboy”), and in 1979 she graduated from the M. K. Čiurlionis School of Art in Vilnius. Her first short stories appeared in the press in 1982–1983. In 1985 she completed the graphic art course at the State Art Institute of Lithuania in Vilnius (now the Vilnius Academy of Arts), and in the same year the publisher Vaga brought out her story collection “The Year of the Lilies of the Valley” (Pakalnučių metai).

After that, things moved quickly. In 1987 the Vilnius Academic Drama Theatre staged her play “Don’t Play with the Moon” (directed by Gytis Padegimas). In 1987–1988 she toured Lithuania with rock marches, in 1988 she was admitted to the Lithuanian Writers’ Union, and in the same year her first novel, “Children of the Moon”, appeared. In 1988–1989 she visited Bulgaria and the United States. In 1991 came “The Magic Cranberry”, a children’s tale that she wrote and illustrated herself; in the autumn of that year she met the 14th Dalai Lama for the first time, during his first visit to Lithuania. Then came the novels “Gardens of Hell” (1992) and “The Magic of Agnija” (1995).

After the scandal of 1993 she travelled to India for the first time and studied Tibetan Buddhism in Dharamsala. In 1993–1995 she travelled in India, Nepal and Tibet, and in 1996 she returned to Dharamsala and Nepal. The journeys set a new direction for everything she did. She is described as a promoter of Buddhism and a participant in the movement for the liberation of Tibet. The journeys produced what is called the Eastern trilogy: “Exiled Tibet” (1996, with a foreword by the Dalai Lama), “Journey to Shambhala” (1997) and “The Lost Promised Land” (1999); the three books were later published together as “The Tibetan Mandala” (2004). She tried to supplement her impressions with exhibitions: in 1998 she showed the drawings “108 Mandalas”, and in 1999 the photographs “Tibet: Another Reality”. This is where, I think, her two professions met: her training in graphic art and her habit of recording what she saw.

In 1998–2000 and 2004–2006 she held a grant from the Ministry of Culture. In 2000 the novel “Gone with the Dreams” appeared. Between 2000 and 2002 she travelled to Egypt, Italy and Peru, and her reflections on these journeys went into the book of essays “The Alchemy of Travel” (2003). The novel “Placebo” came out in the same year. In 2004 she published her first collection of poems, “Dance in the Desert”, and a tale, “How Mars Looked for Happiness on Earth”. In 2003 she received the Officer’s Cross of the Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas, and in 2005 the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Arts, awarded, by its wording, for openness to the world and its cultural diversity (the book “The Tibetan Mandala”) and for a sense of changing values in her novels. In 2005 she published a collection of interviews, “Gentle Interrogations”, and her last novel, “The Fortress of Sleeping Butterflies”. “The Witch and the Rain” meanwhile remained her most translated work: it has appeared in Latvian, Estonian, German, Croatian, Swedish, Czech, Italian and Slovenian. The director Algimantas Puipa made the film “The Spell of Sin” (2007) from three of her novels (this one, “Placebo” and “Gone with the Dreams”).

Jurga Ivanauskaitė died in Vilnius on 17 February 2007. She is buried in Antakalnis Cemetery, on the Artists’ Hill. Her second book of poems, “Ode to Joy”, came out in the same year. In 2008 relatives and friends founded the Centre for the Creative Heritage of the writer, which established a prize in her name for authors under forty-five, “For free, open and bold creative expression”. In April of that year a square at the beginning of Aguonų Street, where she lived, was named after her, and in September 2009 a granite sculpture, “The Cat”, by Ksenija Jaroševaitė, was placed there: cats appear in many of her books.