Antanas Sileika is a Canadian-Lithuanian novelist and critic. He was born in 1953 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, , 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, Sileika began teaching at Humber College and working as a co-editor of the Canadian literary journal, Descant, where he remained until 1988. He wrote extensively as a journalist about Lithuania's re-establishment of independence during the collapse of the Soviet Union from 1988–1991, and for this activity he received the Knight's Cross medal from the Lithuanian government in 2004. After writing for newspapers and magazines, Antanas Sileika published his first novel, Dinner at the End of the World : a speculative story set in the aftermath of global warming. His second book, a collection of linked short stories, Buying On Time 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. The Lithuanian title is "", shortlisted for book of the year in Lithuania in 2014. The book was also translated into Chinese. Antanas Sileika appears occasionally on Canadian television and radio as a free-lance broadcaster. His third book, Woman in Bronze, 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. The Lithuanian title is . His 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. The Lithuanian title is . "The Barefoot Bingo Caller" is his memoir, published by ECW Press in May 2017. It received a starred review in Quill and Quire, Canada's publishing industry journal. The Lithuanian title is, "Basakojis bingo pranašėjas", short-listed for Lithuania's book of the year in 2018 in the category of adult fiction and . He retired in 2017 after fifteen years as director of the Humber School for Writers in Toronto, Canada. His ", an espionage novel set between 1921 and 1923 in Lithuania was inspired by the memoir of that era's chief of counterintelligence, :lt:Jonas Budrys|Jonas Budrys. The Lithuanian title is .
