Making Literature Travel

13th and 14th March 2012

This March we are delighted to have with us in the UK the acclaimed Macedonian poet and translator Nikola Madzirov. Rapidly gaining an international reputation, Madzirov recently published Remnants of Another Age, a collection of his poetry in English translation and he won the East European Hubert Burda poetry award and the prestigious Miladinov Brothers poetry prize for Relocated Stone (2007). Madzirov will be reading alongside local and international poets at two events organised in co-operation with the Manchester poetry collective Bad Language and Poetry Wales:

Poetry from Cuba and Macedonia with Poetry Wales, Bangor, 13th March
with Zoe Skoulding (Wales) and Victor Rodriguez Nunez (Cuba)
 Blue Sky Café, Bangor High Street, 6.30pm

Bad Language, Manchester, 14th March
with local poets David Tait, Sian S Rathore and Kieron King
Kraak Gallery, Stevenson Place, 7.30pm – 9.30pm, £2 www.kraak.co

Madzirov will also be reading at other events in the UK, at London’s South Bank Centre on the 12th of March and at STANza in St Andrews on the 17th of March.

Nikola Madzirov, “a first-rate poet who deserves worldwide attention” (Tottenville Review), is one of the most powerful voices of the new European poetry. He was born in a family of Balkan Wars refugees in 1973 in Strumica, Macedonia. His award-winning poetry has been translated into thirty languages and published in collections and anthologies in US, Europe, Latin America and Asia. In 2011 BOA Editions published a selection of his poetry in the US titled Remnants of Another Age. In the foreword, Carolyn Forché tells us, “Madzirov calls himself ‘an involuntary descendant of refugees,’ referring to his family’s flight from the Balkan Wars a century ago: his surname derives from mazir or majir, meaning ‘people without a home.’ The ideas of shelter and of homelessness, of nomadism, and spiritual transience serves as a palimpsest in these Remnants”—while Madzirov himself tells us in one of his poems, “History is the first border I have to cross.” Adam Zagajewski wrote: “We better watch this talented poet!” Nikola Madzirov received the Hubert Burda international poetry award for authors born in East Europe and many other domestic and international awards and grants as IWP at the Iowa University. American contemporary jazz composer and collaborator of Björk and Lou Reed, Oliver Lake, has composed music based on Madzirov’s poems.

“The poems of Nikola Madzirov are similar in quality to the poems of the Nobel Prize winner Tomas Tranströmer. They are genuine and open. Madzirov searches for a feeling of being at home that no longer requires walls.”

Victor Rodrguez Nunez is one of Cuba’s most noteworthy contemporary writers. He has published eleven books of poetry, many of them recipients of literary awards, including the David Prize (Cuba, 1980), the Plural Prize (Mexico, 1983), the EDUCA Prize (Costa Rica, 1995), the Renacimiento Prize (Spain, 2000), the Fray Luis de León Prize (Spain, 2005) and the Leonor Prize (Spain, 2006). His poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, Mid-American Review, Chelsea, New York Quarterly, The Literary Review, New England Review, Circumference, Salt Hill, and many others internationally. He is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College.

David Tait is the general editor for the Cadaverine and a poet in his own right.

Sian S. Rathore is a poet recently published in UP Literature, the short fiction editor for Metazen and writes for The Huffington Post.

Kieron King is a member of Working Verse, and is fresh from his Amateur Thematics show at The Lowry.