Eugenijus Alishanka, Valts Ernstreits and Veronika Kivisilla

Festival HeadRead is happy to announce a poetry event where the unique voices of the Baltic States meet. Eugenijus Ališanka (1960) is a Lithuanian poet, essayist and translator, whose poetry is characterised by a distinct ability to combine the universal and the local, weave together the landscapes of post-communist Lithuania and the literary and cultural history of Western Europe. His poetry has been compared to the work of Zbiginiew Herbert, and Ališanka himself has translated the poetry of Wisława Szymborska. Ališanka also has a special role in the literary life of Lithuania; from 1994 to 2022, he headed the international poetry festival Poetry Spring, and from 2003 to 2015, he was the editor of The Vilnius Review. Valts Ernštreits (1974) is a Livonian poet, linguist and cultural figure living in Latvia, but his professional and creative life is also strongly connected to Estonia – he has worked as a researcher on the Livonian language at the University of Tartu, where he received his PhD, and he has also compiled Latvian and Livonian dictionaries for Estonians. In 2019, he won the Ilmapuu Prize from the Council of Kindred Nations, which is in the domain of the Ministry of Education and Research. Veronika Kivisilla (1978) is an Estonian poet and prose writer whose best-known work is her gentle and humorous collection of miniatures titled Kuni armastus peale tuleb (2018), which has its origins in social media posts and takes a sensitive and poetic look at the author’s everyday life.