Pranas Mašiotas

Pranas Mašiotas (1863–1940) was a Lithuanian activist and educator best known as children's writer and translator.

Born in Suvalkija to a family of Lithuanian farmers, Mašiotas attended Marijampolė Gymnasium and studied mathematics at Moscow University. As a Catholic, he could not obtain employment in Lithuania and took temporary clerical jobs in Łomża and Riga before becoming math teacher at the Riga Gymnasium in 1891. He held this job until World War I forced him to evacuate to Voronezh where he became director of the Lithuanian girls' and boys' gymnasiums. He returned to Lithuania in 1918 and started working on organizing the education system in the newly independent country. He was vice-minister at the Ministry of Education from 1919 to 1923. He then became director of the . He retired in 1929 and focused on literary work. He died on 14 September 1940.

Mašiotas was very active in Lithuanian cultural life. He joined and organized various Lithuanian societies, including the Lithuanian Scientific Society and the Žvaigždė Society which he chaired for about a decade. He contributed about 600 articles to the Lithuanian press. In total, he published about 140 books of which about 30 are original (others are translations or based on works by others). He mainly published children's fiction, textbooks for schools, and popular science books. He translated such children's classics as ''Maya the Bee'' by Waldemar Bonsels and ''Emil and the Detectives'' by Erich Kästner. Provided by Wikipedia