Antanas Sileika

Antanas Sileika (Antanas Šileika) is a Canadian novelist and critic. He was born in Weston, Ontario - the son of Lithuanian-born parents.

After completing an English degree at the University of Toronto, he moved to Paris for two years and there married his wife, Snaige Sileika (née Valiunas), an art student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. While in Paris, he studied French, taught English in Versailles, and worked as part of the editorial collective of the expatriate literary journal, Paris Voices, run from the upstairs room of the bookstore, Shakespeare and Company. Upon his return to Canada in 1979, Antanas began teaching at Humber College and working as a co-editor of the Canadian literary journal, Descant, where he remained until 1988. After writing for newspapers and magazines, Antanas Sileika published his first novel, Dinner at the End of the World (1994): a speculative story set in the aftermath of global warming.

His second book, a collection of linked short stories, Buying On Time (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.

Antanas Sileika appears occasionally on Canadian television and radio as a free-lance broadcaster. His third book, Woman in Bronze (2004), 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. His latest novel, Underground, was released by Thomas Allen & Son in early 2011. The novel was a love story set in the underground resistance to the Soviet Union in the late 1940s.

He is the director for the Humber School for Writers in Toronto, Canada, and is a past winner of a National Magazine Award.