Luljeta Lleshanaku Features
Albanian poet Luljeta Lleshanaku has published two titles with Bloodaxe. Her 2018 title Negative Space was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation and is on the International shortlist for the Griffin Poetry Award 2019. Her 2011 retrospective Haywire: New & Selected Poems was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation and was shortlisted for the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize 2013.
Lleshanaku's poetry was reviewed in a two-page feature in the 4 April 2019 issue of the London Review of Books.
‘Lleshanaku is hardly new on the international scene… but she is new to me. Her combination of plain-spokenness and intelligence would have been welcome at any time; at present… it is indispensable… These are poems of urgency and imagination, seemingly unaware of the reader and the critic, and certainly not playing up to them, uncluttered and for the most part unforced; they carry Lleshanaku into the proximity of the great 20th-century poets of Central and Eastern Europe: Akhmatova, Herbert, Holub, Szymborska, Zagajewski.’ - Michael Hofmann, London Review of Books
Read Michael Hofmann's full piece on Lleshanaku's poetry in the London Review of Books here.
‘With an ability to transcend time and culture, Lleshanaku is a pioneer of Albanian poetry. Born in 1968, she was 17 when Hoxha died in 1985 and quickly established herself as a powerful poetic voice.’ – Emily Cullen, Director of the Cúirt International Festival of Literature, writing in The Irish Times, ahead of Luljeta Lleshanaku's reading at Cúirt International Festival of Literature on Tuesday 9 April 2019.
Click here to read the full feature.
[27 March 2019]
