Kornelijus Platelis was born in 1951 in Šiauliai. He published his first poems in 1977 and is the author of ten collections of verse: Žodziai ir dienos (Words and Days; 1980), Namai ant tilto (Home on the Bridge; 1984), Pinklės vėjui (Snare for the Wind; 1987), Luoto kevalas (The Boat Shell; 1990), Prakalbos upei (Orations to the River, 1995), Atoslūgio juosta (Tidemark, 2000), Palimpsestai (Palimpsests, 2004), Karstiniai reiškiniai (Cave Phenomena, 2010), Eilėraščiai, (Poems, 2014), and Įtrūkusios mėnesienos (Ruptured Moonlight, 2018). His extended essay on the ecology of culture, Būstas prie Nemuno (Being by the Nemunas), was published in 1989 and Ir mes praeiname (And We Are Passing) in 2011. He has also translated many of the most important American and British poets – among them Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Robert Bringhurst, John Keats, e.e. cummings, Ted Hughes, Czesław Miłosz (poems and “The History of Polish Literature”), Wisława Szymborska, Artur Mędrzyrzecki, Adam Mickiewicz, Adam Naruszwicz – and has been instrumental in developing commentary for a new Lithuanian edition of the Bible. Among his many honors and awards is the National Award for Culture and Arts in 2002. Platelis is the initiator and organizer of the annual international literary festival Druskininkai Poetic Fall. His poetry is noted for its deeply intellectual voice, and inventive use of archetype and myth. It is a mixture of political and declarative styles on the one hand and mystical intensity and metaphysical questioning on the other. His poetry is translated into Armenian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Czech, Chinese, English, French, Gaelic, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian and appeared in various editions. His poetry collections were published in Bulgaria, Italy, Poland, Slovenia, and USA (3).
