AustLit

Betty Birskys married Anton Birskys, a Lithuanian displaced person immigrant on 24 March 1951 at Moorooka, Brisbane. Betty gained a BA Hons in Psychology (UQ), a Diploma of Teaching (Kelvin Grove Teachers College) and completed professional qualifications as a librarian. She has worked as a rates-notice typist for the Brisbane City Council, library assistant, radio copy-writer, Commonwealth Public service graduate clerk, High School teacher and teacher-librarian and, with her husband, operated a newsagency. Birskys was a member of AAMWS (Aust.Army Medical Women's Service) 1942-1944.

Birskys describes herself as a shy child who expressed herself through her writing. In her early twenties she had some success with stories published in now defunct journals including ABC Weekly and Modern Times, until work, marriage and children occupied her time. After her retirement she worked for Australian Pensioners League on their paper Comet, and her booklet Social Justice or Injustice? A Survey of Social Welfare in Australia (1980) was published by the League. She then returned to her real passion, fiction, and for a decade wrote with some success, particularly of her 'Lithuanian' work, with the encouragement of her husband. Short stories were published in journals such as Meanjin, Southerly, Overland, Hecate, Imago, Span, and Idiom. She won several prizes and Queensland Government Awards and her work appeared in a number of anthologies. Her novel At the Island was twice shortlisted for Angus and Robertson Bookworld prize but not published.With her husband, she wrote the Lithuanian section of Baltic Peoples in Australia (1986).

Birskys' novel Homeland is a fictional memoir of her life with her family and her husband who died in 2002.