Photo Credit:
Photo credit
Irmantas Galunas
Antanas Sileika
BIO
Biography

 

Publications:

The Death of Tony, nonfiction, Stonehewer Books, 2024

Some Unfinished Business, Cormorant Books, 2023

Provisionally Yours, Biblioasis, 2019.

The Barefoot Bingo Caller. ECW, 2017

Underground. Thomas Allen, 2011

Woman in Bronze. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2004.

Buying on Time. Erin, ON: Porcupine's Quill, 1997.

Dinner At the End of the World. Oakville, ON: Mosaic Press, 1994.

Various anthologies

Awards
Shortlisted, Stephen Leacock Award for Humour 1997; Shortlisted, City of Toronto Book Award 1997, Globe 100 Best Books 2004 and 2011, Barefoot Bingo Caller wins Book of the Year in translation in Lithuania 2019.

Translations: Some of the above books translated into Italian (2), Chinese (2), Lithuanian (6)

 

The Death of Tony (Stonehewer Books, 2024) is a book-length autobiographical essay on belonging in two worlds.

Some Unfinished Business (Cormorant Books, 2023) based on historical facts and characters, primarily on a children's writer in the post-war Soviet Union who shot an underground resistance fighter in the head in order to be permitted to publish his stories. The murderer went on to great literary acclaim.

Provisionally Yours, an espionage novel set in 1921 in Eastern Europe (Biblioasis), appeared in 2019. Publisher's Weekly described it as "an urbane thriller." The title premiered as a feature film in Lithuania and VOD in November of 2023 and additionally as an 8-part TV serial in Lithuania in spring of 2024.

His memoir, The Barefoot Bingo Caller, was published by ECW in 2017. It received a starred review in Quill and Quire and the translation won Book of the Year in 2018 in Lithuania, where most of his works have been published. 

Underground, (Thomas Allan, 2011) told the story of anti-Soviet postwar resistance and was optioned for a feature film.

His third book, Woman in Bronze (Random House, 2004), a novel, compared the seasonal life of a young man in Czarist Lithuania with his subsequent attempts to succeed as a prominent sculptor in Paris in the twenties. The novel was selected as one of the Globe's 100 best books of the year.His next novel, Underground, was published by Thomas Allen & Son in spring of 2011. Underground is a love story set in the underground resistance to the Soviet Union in the late 1940's. This novel was chosen as one of The Globe and Mail's top 100 books of 2011. A film option was sold to Donelos Studija. Currently being translated into Chinese. Translated into Lithuanian.

Buying On Time (Porcupine's Quill 1997), was nominated for both the City of Toronto Book Award and the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour, and was serialized on CBC Radio's Between the Covers. The book traces the lives of a family of immigrants to a Canadian suburb between the fifties and seventies. Some of these stories were anthologized in Dreaming Home, Canadian Short Stories, and the Penguin Anthology of Canadian Humour. The book was long listed for Canada Reads. Translated into Itralian, Chinese, Lithuanian.

Antanas Sileika published his first novel, Dinner at the End of the World (Mosaic, 1994), a speculative story set in the aftermath of global warming.His second book, a collection of linked short stories,

Antanas Sileika, worked on the literary journal, Paris Voices, published out of a room above a bookstore called Shakespeare and Company in 1978 and 1979. In the eighties, he began teaching at Humber College and working as a co-editor of the Canadian literary journal, Descant, where he remained until 1988. Antanas Sileika was the director for the Humber School for Writers from 2002-2017 and continues to teach a few  students for the school each year. A past winner of a National Magazine Award. 

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