Tomas Venclova: profile & reviews for The Grove of the Eumenides
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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US distribution by Consortium Book Sales
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US ONLINE PROFILE OF TOMAS VENCLOVA
Poetry Foundation, online 23 March 2026
An in-depth essay on the Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova went online on the Poetry Foundation’s website on 23 March 2026. As well as covering Tomas Venclova’s life and work in general, Michael Casper quotes extensively from Venclova’s new retrospective The Grove of the Eumenides: New & Selected Poems (translated by Ellen Hinsey, Diana Senechal and Rimas Uzgiris). The piece ran under the standfirst: ‘An unlikely dissident inspired by the classics, Tomas Venclova remains Lithuania’s greatest poet.’
'A cerebral poet with a meditative sensibility and meticulous attention to form, Venclova belongs more naturally on the shelf next to his acquaintances Brodsky, Czesław Miłosz, and Anna Akhmatova than among other Lithuanian poets. Rejecting both official Soviet aesthetics and the pastoral folkways typical of Lithuanian verse, he draws much of his inspiration from the classical tradition. [...] Venclova’s is a poetry of melancholy and absence—of unpeopled landscapes and the past. But his search for, and persistent belief in, a higher order remains ever-present, even in the disenchanted sacred groves of Lithuania.' – Michael Casper, Poetry Foundation, on Tomas Venclova
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/1782638/return-to-the-sacred-grove
ONLINE REVIEWS
The Lake, March 2026
A very good review of Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova’s new retrospective The Grove of the Eumenides: New & Selected Poems (translated by Ellen Hinsey, Diana Senechal and Rimas Uzgiris) went online in the March 2026 issue of The Lake.
‘The term ‘magisterial’ seems apt for this achievement, as its author approaches his tenth decade. If only its insightful commentaries on the state of the world were not necessary!’ – Hannah Stone, The Lake
https://www.thelakepoetry.co.uk/reviews/march26/
INTERNATIONAL ONLINE REVIEW COVERAGE
Asymptote Journal, What’s New in Translation, online 11 November 2025
A brilliant review of Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova’s new retrospective The Grove of the Eumenides: New & Selected Poems (translated by Ellen Hinsey, Diana Senechal and Rimas Uzgiris) was included in Asymptote Journal’s What’s New in Translation: November 2025 feature. Asymptote is the premier site for world literature in translation.
‘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 […] 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. […] Ellen Hinsey, Diana Senechal, and Rimas Uzgiris have provided a great service by presenting Venclova in their unified, expert translations. […] From Eastern Europe to Greece, Greenland to Hamden, Connecticut, Venclova takes the reader on a tour across the world and the historical events that have made it, in turns, so horrifying and so beautiful. Both Brodsky and Miłosz won Nobels, and after reading this exquisite collection, I’m left wondering: Where’s Venclova’s?' – Jason Gordy Walker, Asymptote Journal
Read online in full here.
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TOMAS VENCLOVA READINGS & DISCUSSION
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 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
Thursday 26 & Friday 27 February 2026
Tomas Venclova on Being a Dissident in the Soviet Union
Tomas Venclova co-founded the Lithuanian Helsinki Group in 1976, the first dissident human rights organisation in the former Lithuanian SSR. In 1977, he was forced to emigrate to the United States and was deprived of his Soviet citizenship. The Lithuanian Culture Institute arranged from him to give a poetry reading at the British Library in February 2026 followed by a discussion at Cambridge University's Centre for Geopolitics, coinciding with Bloodaxe's recent publication of The Grove of the Eumenides: New & Selected Poems. This video shows the Cambridge event, a discussion with Dr Donatas Kupčiūnas of Venclova's dissident years in the Soviet Baltic of the 1970s, shedding light on Brezhnev-era repressions, the power of hope and despair, and on the broader significance of the Helsinki Accords for the gradual – later ill-fated – liberalisation of the USSR.
With thanks to the Lithuanian Culture Institute for its support with translation costs.
[24 March 2026]
