In the past, nations demonized various ‘Others’ in order to define themselves in a positive, but exclusivist way. In post-national times, the 'Other' is more diffuse, in a permanent state of negotiation and redefinition. The 'Other' is everyone. After the fall of communism, a new generation of poets from Eastern Europe started to challenge their national ‘Others’ going beyond the limits of their own culture, nationality or ethnicity. Poetry fought against ideological labelling, in order to create a re-newed space of social contestation and critical activism. In the last years, an (apparently) more unified Europe led to a re-nationalization of cultures. Poetry gives voice to what is silent and foreign. What is its reaction to events of ‘re-nationalization’ of public sphere? How is poetry testing the limits of ‘nationhood’ in contemporary Eastern Europe? We will discuss those issues with 4 young poets from Romania and Ukraine.
Elena Vlădăreanu was born in 1981, in Medgidia, Constanţa. She studied Philology and earned an interdisciplinary Master in Performance, Multimedia and Society from the Bucharest Centre for Excellence in Image Research, with a study on the performativity of contemporary poetry. She published seven poetry collections and worked as cultural journalist for important Romanian daily newspapers and cultural magazines. Currently she works as a journalist for Radio România Cultural. In 2008 she received an European grant for a documentary about the contemporary Bulgarian culture.
She wrote plays for children: Live from Feliningrad (a radio play that was broadcasted online in 2011 ) and The Spy Princesses (Gong Theater for Children and Youth, Sibiu 2014). In 2014 she created, together with Robert Bălan, the performance Habemus Bebe, a manifesto about maternity. One of her poetry collection, Privat Space, was transformed into a do-it-yourself performance in February 2015. In 2016, she and her partner created A Secure Life, a show on surveillance, for the National Theatre in Targu-Mures. In 2017 they created Natural Identical Flavorings, a show on food.
Her poems have been published in several international anthologies, such as The Vanishing Point That Whistles. An Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Poetry (2011, USA) and No Longer Poetry. New Romanian Poetry (2007, UK). The collection Spațiu Privat was translated into Italian and was published by Pietre Vive Publishing House in 2016. She is interested in creating poetry using the instruments of other media; her creation often revolves around the human body and its limitations, questioning at the same time its political dimension. She lives and works in Bucharest.
Claudiu Komartin was born in Bucharest in 1983. His first poetry collection, Păpușarul și alte insomnii (“The Puppeteer And Other Insomnia”, 2003, 2007) won the most prestigious awards for literary debut (e.g. the “Mihai Eminescu” National Poetry Award). He also published Circul domestic (“Domestic Circus”, 2005), which was awarded The Romanian Academy Poetry Prize, Un anotimp în Berceni (“A Season in Berceni”, 2009, 2010), Cobalt (“Cobalt”, 2013) and the anthology Maeștrii unei arte muribunde (2010-2017) (“Masters of a Dying Art (2010-2017)”, 2017). He is also co-author of two plays and of three anthologies of Romanian contemporary poetry. His books were translated into German (2012), Serbian (2015), Turkish (2015) and Bulgarian (2017). Since 2010, Claudiu Komartin is editor-in-chief of “Poesis international” literary magazine and of Max Blecher Publishing House. He is also coordinating a popular reading club in Bucharest, “Institutul Blecher”. He translated literature from French, English and Italian.
Katerina Kalytko is a writer and translator, and one of the most powerful voices of the younger literary generation in Ukraine. She is the author of six poetry collections. The recent one, Torture Chamber. Vineyard. Home, has brought her the Litaccent of the Year Prize. Katerina also published two books of short prose, M(h)ysteria and Land of All Those Lost, or Short Scary Tales. Her writings have been translated into English, German, Polish, Armenian, Lithuanian, Slovenian, Serbian, Italian, Bulgarian and Hebrew. Katerina Kalytko is a scholarship holder of the CEI Fellowship for Writers in Residence in 2015. In 2016 she was awarded the Vilenica Crystal prize. She is a laureate of the BBC Book of the Year and the Joseph Conrad Award in 2017. She also translates from the Balkan languages. Her new poetry book Bunar is coming this April 2018.
Iryna Shuvalova is a Ukrainian poet, translator and scholar. Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1986, she started writing from an early age and later developed a scholarly interest in literature. She published three collections of poems in Ukrainian: 'Ran' (2011), 'Os' (2014) and 'Az' (2014), and undertook a number of writing residencies in different parts of Europe: among them, the Hawthornden Fellowship in 2015. In 2009, she co-edited '120 pages of Sodom' - the first queer anthology in Ukraine. She went on to win a number of writing and translation awards, including the Joseph Brodsky / Stephen Spender Prize in 2012. Her most recent book-length translation into Ukrainian was Yann Martel's 'Life of Pi' (2016). Her poetry has been translated into nine languages and published in 'Modern Poetry in Translation', 'Ambit', 'Podium Literatur', 'Radar', 'The Wolf' and 'International Poetry Review' among others. She was featured in the CBC Arts documentary project "Interrupt This Program: Kiev", and her poetry was recently read from stage at the Royal Court Theater in London. She performed widely at the readings and festivals abroad, including Yara's Winter Festival in New York and, most recently, the Oslo International Poetry Festival of 2017 where she also delivered the opening keynote speech. Iryna holds an MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College where she studied on a Fulbright scholarship. Currently, she is a PhD student and Gates scholar at the University of Cambridge where her research centers on the role of oral poetry in war-affected communities. She also serves as an assessor for English PEN.
Susanne Frank (Humboldt University Berlin) studied in Vienna, Konstanz and Moscow, and graduated from University of Konstanz: 1988 Master of Arts (Slavic Studies/ History) 1996 PhD (Russian Literature); 2004 Habilitation (Slavic and comparative literatures). Since 2019 she is chair of East Slavic Literatures and Cultures at the Institute for Slavic Studies
Her current fields of research are:
Geopoetics and geopolitics
Russian and Russian-language literatures in multilingual contexts
History and current developments of literatures in (post)imperial contexts (Ukrainian, Georgian, and Azerbaidzhan literature)
Magical realism as a post-colonial mode of writing: latin american and (post)soviet literatures in comparison
Ecological approaches to cultural semantics
Miruna Vlada is a Romanian writer, cultural facilitator and political researcher based in Bucharest. She studied political science and international relations in Bucharest, Graz, Berlin and Ljubljana. In the last 10 years she organized and moderated numerous literary events in the main cities in Romania. In 2014 she published her PhD thesis (Bosnia and Herzegovina – a critical case study of Europeanization) and now she teaches international relations at the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration in Bucharest. She published three books of poetry and she was included in most anthologies with the best young Romanian poets. She participated in international literary readings in Bruxelles, London, Stockholm, and Leipzig. Selections of her poems have been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Serbian, Macedonian, Spanish, Swedish and Albanian. Since 2016 she is a board member of the PEN Club Romania. She is working on her first novel.
Tue 27 Feb 2018
