From Verses to Melodies

Historically, creative expression has been a mirror of society and a personal release for people trying to negotiate their inner realms. Often, art results from an almost unintentional impulse to create rather than a conscious aim influenced by experience, memory, and emotion. Creation has always existed for Lithuanian-British author, poet, and musician Nina Barbora Evans somewhere between need and instinct—a personal reaction to public and personal reality.

Nina Barbora was born in the Lithuanian Soviet Republic in 1965 and grew up in a complicated cultural environment molded by Soviet influence and local customs. Her work will, over time, include many genres—poetry, prose, songwriting—each one providing a somewhat different perspective to investigate what it is to be human. Many people comment on the work’s rawness, a purposeful rejection of sentimentalizing personal history or smoothing over challenging events.

Nina Barbora has characterized her creative process as more of an internal drive calling for release than a voluntary one. For her, writing started not as a deliberately selected profession but rather as a means of coping with times when emotions and ideas fought to be restrained. In interviews, she has often commented on the erratic nature of inspiration, calling it a force that may upset everyday life.

Often challenging traditional frameworks, her early writing blurred the lines between poetry and prose. Her published works include many genres, including lyrical reflections, autobiographical fiction, experimental prose, and a historical dark comedy colored with mysticism. Some works come straight from her personal experience or observation of others around her. In contrast, others feel more distant—inhabited by voices and characters she describes almost as visitors rather than inventions.

The impact of Nina Barbora’s writing has sometimes extended beyond literary circles, surfacing unexpectedly in readers’ lives. In one instance, a doctor known to her began selling copies of her poetry books to patients, believing in their therapeutic qualities. She noticed that women were buying the books and occasionally stealing them. One particular account stands out from this period: a woman facing economic hardship and contemplating moving abroad to engage in sex work came across Nina Barbora’s poetry. The meeting allegedly changed the woman’s course, driving her to give up her initial intentions, follow a completely other profession, and finally settle into a life much different from what she originally envisioned.

Although anecdotal, these events point to some of the impact personal stories may have using resonance rather than teaching or counsel. Nina Barbora’s ability to voice experiences that many readers feel but struggle to articulate has often been remarked upon. In a television interview early in her career, upon learning she was only 27, a journalist expressed disbelief, having assumed from her writing that she was much older. For Nina Barbora, the comment served as a reminder that emotional insight is rarely a matter of age.

Music, too, became an extension of this same creative impulse. Her approach to songwriting mirrors her writing practice in its refusal to conform to expectations. The songs, shaped by experience rather than formula, often explore love, separation, change, and occasionally, release themes. Listeners encountering her music for the first time frequently remark on its demand for attention; these are not background melodies but compositions that insist on presence. For Nina Barbora, this is not accidental. In her view, music—like poetry—requires engagement. Passive consumption is not the goal.

The reception of her musical work varies. Some listeners find comfort in its unfiltered emotionality; others, she admits, are challenged by its refusal to entertain in conventional ways. But whatever the response, the music, like the writing, operates on its own terms. For Nina Barbora, both mediums are rooted in observation—not only of others but of herself—and in a belief that reflection is central to growth or change.

Over the years, her projects have expanded to include cultural work, television collaborations, and educational initiatives. Yet she maintains that the essential drive behind her creativity has remained the same. The stories come when they come. The songs arrive in fragments or, suddenly, fully formed. In some cases, the ideas originate from her own life; in others, she has described feeling like she steps into the emotional world of someone entirely unfamiliar, channeling experiences that are not directly her own.

Asked about her plans, Nina Barbora tends to respond without grand projections. Whatever the next chapter might hold—whether it involves her ongoing literary output, new musical projects, or even a television series currently in development—she returns to the same idea: creation is not something she does to fill time or to meet demand. It is, for her, a way of being in the world.

In many ways, Nina Barbora’s journey reflects the shifting role of artists in contemporary culture. No longer confined to single disciplines or traditional categories, creators like her move between forms and fields, guided less by market expectations than by an internal logic shaped by experience and reflection. Through writing, music, and narrative, her work points to something enduring: the ability of art not only to describe life but to shape it—and, occasionally, to change its course entirely.