Dalia Grinkevičiūtė (1927–87) was born in Kaunas, the former capital of Lithuania. She spent her teenage years in a Siberian gulag. At twenty-one she escaped and returned to her home country only to be deported to Siberia once again in 1951. She was released five years later, then studied medicine. Grinkevičiūtė’s writings are now placed firmly in the Lithuanian canon.