{"id":2689,"date":"2022-01-04T14:03:08","date_gmt":"2022-01-04T19:03:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wenetwork.ca\/site\/?p=2689"},"modified":"2022-10-31T15:45:23","modified_gmt":"2022-10-31T19:45:23","slug":"breakfast-meeting-november-19-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wenetwork.ca\/site\/breakfast-meeting-november-19-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"Breakfast Meeting November 19, 2022"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Antanas Sileika<\/strong> is a Canadian novelist and critic, after completing an English degree at the University of Toronto, he moved to Paris for two years and there married his wife, Snaige Sileika<\/a>\u00a0(nee Valiunas), an art student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.\u00a0 While in Paris, \u00a0he worked as part of the editorial collective of the expatriate literary journal, Paris Voices, run from the upstairs room of the bookstore,\u00a0Shakespeare and Company<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Upon his return to Canada in 1979, Antanas began teaching at Humber College and working as a co-editor of the Canadian literary journal,\u00a0Descant<\/a>, where he remained until 1988.<\/p>\n

He became involved through journalism \u00a0with Lithuania\u2019s restitution of independence during the fall of The Soviet Union 1988-1991, and for this activity he received the Knight\u2019s Cross medal from the Lithuanian government in 2004.<\/p>\n

A past winner of a national magazine award, he retired in June of 2017 as the director for the\u00a0Humber School for Writers<\/a>\u00a0in Toronto.<\/p>\n

After writing for newspapers and magazines, Antanas published his first novel,\u00a0Dinner at the End of the World<\/em>\u00a0(1994), a speculative story set in the aftermath of global warming.<\/p>\n

His second book, a collection of linked short stories,\u00a0Buying On Time<\/em>\u00a0(1997), was nominated for both the City of Toronto Book Award and the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour, and was serialized on CBC Radio\u2019s Between the Covers. In 2016, almost twenty years later, it was long-listed for Canada Reads and the translation was short-listed in Lithuania for Book of the Year. 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.<\/p>\n

Antanas\u2019s \u00a0memoir,\u00a0The Barefoot Bingo Caller<\/em>, was released in spring of 2017 by ECW. Author Miriam Toews called the memoir \u201cEvocative, unfailingly honest, and dead-on funny.\u201d The book received a starred review in Quill and Quire. The translation of this memoir,\u00a0Basakojis Bingo Prane\u0161\u0117jas<\/em>, went on to win book of the year for 2018 in Lithuania.<\/p>\n

Provisionally Yours<\/em>, a historical espionage novel set in Kaunas in the 1920\u2019s , was published \u00a0by Biblioasis in March of 2019 . UK author Samantha Harvey said of the book, \u201cI loved this novel.\u201d Publishers Weekly called it \u201can urbane thriller.\u201d \u00a0and the Toronto Star called it \u201ca finely honed political thriller.\u201d The Lithuanian translation, called\u00a0Laikinai J\u016bs\u0173<\/em>, published by Baltos Lankos, was positively reviewed in that country. .<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Antanas Sileika is a Canadian novelist and critic, after completing an English degree at the University of Toronto, he moved to Paris for two years and there married his wife, Snaige Sileika\u00a0(nee Valiunas), an art student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.\u00a0 While in Paris, \u00a0he worked as part of the editorial collective of the expatriate … Continue reading Breakfast Meeting November 19, 2022<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-breakfast-speakers-2022"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8RivX-Hn","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wenetwork.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wenetwork.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wenetwork.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wenetwork.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wenetwork.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2689"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/wenetwork.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2787,"href":"https:\/\/wenetwork.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2689\/revisions\/2787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wenetwork.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wenetwork.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wenetwork.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}