Born in the village of Kraku, near Mosedis, Lidija Šimkute fled Lithuania with her parents during World War II and spent her young childhood in a displaced persons' camp in Germany, emigrating to Australia at the age of seven. She completed her tertiary studies in Geelong and in an internship in Perth. She became a Nutritionist/Dietitian by profession. Keen to maintain her mother tongue, she furthered her studies in Lithuanian Language, Literature, Mythology and History by correspondence through the Lithuanian Language Institute in Chicago (1973-8) and at Vilnius University in 1977 and 1978. She has travelled widely, presenting papers and reading her poetry at various Lithuanian and other conventions and readings in Australia, Europe, South America, Lithuania and the United States. She has had writers' residencies at The Baltic Writers' Centre in Visby, Sweden (1997) and at The International Writers' Centre in Rhodes, Greece (1998) and has been interviewed and has read her poetry on several radio programmes. In 1993 she received a grant from the South Australia Department for Arts and Cultural Heritage. She has translated and reworked her earlier poems into English and has translated some Australian poets and other writers from English into Lithuanian. Her work has been translated also into Italian, German, Polish and Arabic and was translated into Latvian for the Autumn Poetry Festival Anthology. She received a Writer's Residency at The Estonian Writers' Centre in Kasmu, Estonia, in September 2000. She has been a collector of Lithuanian bookplates and published two bilingual booklets on them in 1980 and 1987.
