Vaiva Grainytė

Born 1984 in Kaunas/Lithuania.

Vaiva Grainytė is a writer, playwright, essayist and poet, engaged in interdisciplinary theatre projects.

Her book of essays Peking Diaries was nominated for Book of the Year 2012 and shortlisted as one of twelve of the most creative books in Lithuania. Latest works – collaborative site specific promenade-performance Lucky Lucy (Norway/Lithuania/Iceland, 2016), radio plays Axis deviation (Lithuania, 2015), and Witches do not eat gummy bears (Cape Town/South Africa, 2015) emphasize the main qualities of her oeuvre: biographical and collective memory, documentary and fiction, daily routine and social issues are in equilibrium with poetic, slightly absurd, ironic and surreal overtones. She was a selected fellow at Kulturkontakt (Vienna/Austria 2015), Literaturhaus Villa Clementine (Wiesbaden/Germany 2015), and a delegated writer to the Gothenburg Book Fair (Sweden, 2014). She is librettist of the contemporary operas Sun and Sea (Lithuania, 2017) and Have a Good Day! (Lithuania, 2013) – both pieces share equal authorship with composer Lina Lapelytė and director Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė. In their collaborative works the artistic trio reflects various forms of capitalism and consumption, focusing on the relationship between documentation and fiction, realism and poetry, as well as on the crossover of theatre, music and fine arts. Their first work – a contemporary opera for ten singing cashiers and piano (2013) – received six prestigious awards and was shown in international music, theater and opera festivals in USA, China, Germany, Switzerland,  Netherlands, Portugal, Estonia, Latvia, Russia, the Ukraine and more than ten international theatre festivals in France; Have a Good Day!  was  broadcasted on BBC3 Radio. In 2018, the artists are invited to work at Staatsschauspiel Dresden to stage the German version of the opera performance Sun and Sea which focuses on daily aspects of the anthropocene.