Tomas Venclova Launch Readings
‘Every major poet has an idiosyncratic inner landscape against which his voice sounds in his mind… [Venclova’s] landscape is that of the Baltic in winter, a monochromatic setting dominated by damp and cloudy hues – the light of the skies condensed into darkness.’ – Joseph Brodsky
With The Grove of the Eumenides: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2025), the Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova affirms his place as one of Europe’s greatest living poets, the heir to Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Miłosz. Venclova’s masterful poetry upholds a vision of the world that enables us to endure the darkness of our time through his singular insights, ethical endurance and profound compassion.
Tomas Venclova was born in 1937 in Klaipeda, Lithuania. After graduating from Vilnius University, he travelled in the Eastern Bloc, where he met and translated Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak. Venclova took part in the Lithuanian and Soviet dissident movements, making friends with Natalia Gorbanevskaya and Lyudmila Alexeyeva and other members of the literary and human rights underground. His activities led to a ban on publishing, exile and the stripping of his Soviet citizenship in 1977. He has been the recipient of numerous prizes including the Vilenica 1990 International Literary Prize, the Lithuanian National Prize in 2000, the 2002 Prize of Two Nations, which he received jointly with Czesław Miłosz, the 2005 Jotvingiai Prize, and the 2005 New Culture of New Europe Prize, and the 2023 Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award. His poetry has been translated into English in books including Winter Dialogue (Northwestern University Press, 1997), and two retrospective editions with no overlap between them, The Junction: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008) and The Grove of the Eumenides: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2025). Magnetic North: Conversations with Tomas Venclova by Ellen Hinsey was published by University of Rochester Press and Boydell & Brewer in 2017. After many years in New Haven, Connecticut, and a period spent in Kraków, he returned to Lithuania and now lives in Vilnius.
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The Grove of the Eumenides was given a wonderful review in Asymptote Journal's November 2025 new books in translation feature. Read online in full here.
'Picking up where Venclova’s previous selected volume, The Junction, left off, the poems in The Grove of the Eumenides offer a strong sense of the poet’s late style: often rhyming, employing iambic or syllabic metrical patterns, and with many examining the themes of aging, memory, and cycles of history. The resulting collection is layered with myth, philosophy, and political wisdom, shimmering with rich context and thoughtful diction, and invokes a compassionate, democratic spirit that is as important now as it has always been.' – Jason Gordy Walker, Asymptote Journal (What’s New in Translation: November 2025)
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FORTHCOMING UK READINGS BY TOMAS VENCLOVA
Tomas Venclova will be visiting the UK for two events in February:
Tomas Venclova In Conversation
Organised in partnership with the Lithuanian Culture Institute and the Lithuanian Embassy in London.
Thursday 26 February 2026, 6pm
In conversation and reading at The British Library
The Foyles Suite, British Library, 96 Euston Rd, London NW1 2DB. With Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley and translator Ellen Hinsey.
Free or charge, with registration which will be open on the British Library website on 5 February
Friday 27 February, 5.30pm
In conversation with at Donatas Kupčiūnas at Cambridge University
Ramsden Room, St Catharine's College, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, CB2 1RL.
Organised by Cambridge University's Centre for Geopolitics. Free of charge. Registration and further details here.
PAST EVENTS
Thursday 20 November 2025
Bloodaxe Online Launch Event
Bloodaxe hosted this online launch event for new titles by Tomas Venclova, Pia Tafdrup and Ivan V. Lalić (1931-96) on Thursday 20 November 2025. Reading from and discussing the books with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley, were Tomas Venclova in Vilnius with translator Ellen Hinsey in Berlin, Pia Tafdrup in Copenhagen, and Ivan V. Lalić's translator Francis R. Jones (in Northumberland) with Professor Svetlana Šeatović (in Belgrade).
This free Bloodaxe launch event was streamed on YouTube Live and is now available to watch below, and on this YouTube page: https://youtube.com/live/OTRTqP2CCSc
[28 January 2026]
