Mindaugas Kvietkauskas is a literary scholar, writer and translator. He was a director of the Lithuanian Literature and Folklore Institute in Vilnius in 2008-2018, and a minister of culture of Lithuania in 2019-2020.

Kvietkauskas acquired a Ph.D. at Vilnius University, and studied Yiddish language and literature at the University of Oxford. His main areas of research are multinational literary modernism and urban culture in Lithuania and East Central Europe. He is an author of two academic monographs, a collection of poetry and a book of literary essays Uosto fuga (The Port Fugue).

In 2019, he edited the Unlocked Diary by a young Lithuanian-Jewish poet Matilda Olkinaitė, who was killed during the Holocaust. Kvietkauskas has also translated several books from Polish and Yiddish languages, including works by Czesław Miłosz and Abraham Sutzkever, and the Vilna Ghetto Diary by Yitzkhak Rudashevski.