After completing an English degree at the University of Toronto, he moved to Paris for two years and there married his wife, Snaige Sileika (née Valiunas), an art student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
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.
After writing for newspapers and magazines, Sileika published his first novel, Dinner at the End of the World (1994), a speculative story set in the aftermath of global warming.
His third book, Woman in Bronze (2004), 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 translation Basakojis bingo pranešėjas was named Lithuania's book of the year in 2018 in the category of adult fiction.
[6] Provisionally Yours is an espionage novel set between 1921 and 1923 in Lithuania and was inspired by the memoir of Jonas Budrys, chief of counterintelligence at the time.