Born into a family of Balkan Wars
refugees in 1973 in Strumica, Macedonia, poet, essayist and translator Nikola
Madzirov has emerged as one of the most powerful voices of the new European
poetry. His work has been translated into thirty languages and published in
collections and anthologies in the US, Latin America, Europe and Asia. He
received the Hubert Burda Prize for his book of poetry Relocated Stone (2007), and the most prestigious Macedonian poetry
Prize, the Miladinov Brothers Award. For the book Locked in the City (1999) he was awarded the Studentski Zbor Award
for best debut, while for the collection of poems Somewhere Nowhere (1999) he was given the Aco Karamanoc Prize. Two
short films based on his poetry have been shot in Bulgaria and Croatia. Oliver
Lake, the contemporary jazz composer who has previously collaborated with Björk
and Lou Reed, has composed music based on Madzirov’s poetry, which was
performed at the Jazz-Poetry Concert in Pittsburgh in 2008. Madzirov has
participated at many international literary festivals and events in the US and
abroad and has received several international awards and fellowships, from such
varied places as the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa,
Literarisches Tandem in Berlin, KulturKontakt in Vienna, the Internationales
Haus der Autoren in Graz, the Literartur Haus NÖ in Krems, and Villa Waldberta
in Munich. He is one of the coordinators of the world poetry network lyrikline.org.
