Ona Baliukonė

Biography

Ona Baliukonė’s first collection was called “Laukinės vaivorykštės”, “Wild Rainbows”. It came out from the Vilnius publisher Vaga in 1971, when the author was twenty-two.

She was born on 1 June 1948 in the village of Kančėnai in the Alytus district, four kilometres from Daugai. She went to secondary school in Daugai and finished it there. She made her literary debut in 1968, and her first poems were printed that same year. In 1970 she graduated from Vilnius University in Lithuanian language and literature. Her surname is also often written Baliukonytė. She worked on the staff of the school magazine “Moksleivis”, the weekly for teachers “Dialogas” and the cultural weekly “Dienovidis”. From 1975 she was a member of the Writers’ Union of Lithuania.

After “Wild Rainbows” her books appeared at intervals of a few years: “Viltis” (“Hope”, 1976), “Iš kelio dulkių” (“From the Dust of the Road”, 1982), “Tėve mūsų gyvenime” (1986), “Vaduok” (1994), “Bokštai” (“Towers”, 1996), “Elgetaujanti saulė” (“The Begging Sun”, 1998), “Neregio sodai” (“Gardens of the Blind Man”, 2001) and “Akmuva” (2003). Critics note that the early poems are marked by emotional openness and a sense of unity between human beings and nature, while in the 1982 collection drama, ethical maximalism and moods of loneliness grow stronger. In the later books Christian motifs are interwoven with images from Eastern religions. She is called one of the principal voices of women’s experience in contemporary Lithuanian poetry: she understood the poetic word as the cycle of life, birth, death and rebirth. To my mind, the titles of the 1990s collections show this shift from landscape to metaphysics best, though it is risky to judge poems by their titles alone. Her poems were translated into Russian by Georgy Yefremov. She also wrote prose. In 1987 came a book of essays, “Kelionės fragmentai” (“Fragments of Journeys”), in 2003 a second, “Ant sapnų tilto” (“On the Bridge of Dreams”), and in 2006 a fairy tale, “Kopų karalienė” (“The Queen of the Dunes”). She compiled a book of recollections of Monsignor Kazimieras Vasiliauskas (2002) and prepared an edition of his letters to Zita Žemaitytė (2004). From Russian she translated the talks and lectures of Beinsa Duno, “The Teacher Speaks” (1997). She also compiled the almanacs “Spring of Poetry” (1997, 1998).

Painting remained a separate matter: in 2000 and 2001 she held two exhibitions of her pictures. There are almost no documents about what was shown in them.

Honours came from 1983, when she won the “Spring of Poetry” festival. In 1998 she received the Lithuanian Government Prize in the arts and the Knight’s Cross of the Order of the Grand Duke Gediminas of Lithuania. In 2002 the book about Vasiliauskas won the prize of the Vilnius Club and Vilnius Television, and in 2003 “Akmuva” brought her the Paulius Širvys Prize. In 2004 Baliukonė became a laureate of the National Prize of Lithuania for culture and art. In 2006 she was awarded the “Varpai” literary prize for the poem cycle “Kovo agonijos”.

She died on 20 November 2007 in Vilnius and is buried in Antakalnis Cemetery.