Macedonian poet, editor, essayist and translator Nikola Madzirov was born in Strumica in 1973 to a family of Balkan War refugees, and grew up in the Soviet era in the former Republic of Yugoslavia ruled by Marshall Tito. He was 18 when Macedonia gained independence, and has since published several collections of poetry, including Studentski Zbor award-winner Locked in the City (1999), Aco Karamanov Award-winner Somewhere Nowhere (1999), and Relocated Stone (2007), winner of the Hubert Burda Prize for East European poets. The contemporary jazz composer and collaborator of Bjork and Lou Reed, Oliver Lake, has composed music based on Madzirov's poems. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. The first translation of his poetry into English was Remnants of Another Age, translated by Peggy Reid, Graham Reid, Magdalena Horvat and Adam Reed, and published with a foreword by Carolyn Forche by BOA Editions in the US in 2011 and by Bloodaxe Books in the UK in 2013. A German edition, Versetzter Stein, translated by Alexander Sitzmann, was published by Hanser Verlag in 2011. He has taken part in many literature festivals, including Poetry Parnassus at London's Southbank Centre in 2012, and has received several international awards and fellowships, including the DJS award for contemporary world poetry in China, International Writing Program at the University of Iowa and Literarisches Tandem in Berlin. His other honours include the Marguerite Yourcenar fellowship, the Miladinov Brothers poetry prize (Struga Poetry Evenings) and residencies at KulturKontakt in Vienna, LCB in Berlin and Villa Waldberta in Munich. He is one of the coordinators of the international poetry network for Lyrikline.
Carolyn Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950, and has taught at several universities. She was Director of Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, and held the Lannan Visiting Chair in Poetry at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, where she is now a University Professor. Her many honours include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts; the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award, given in 1997 for using her poetry as a ‘means to attain understanding, reconciliation, and peace within communities and between communities’; and most recently, Yale University's Windham-Campbell Prize. Her first collection, Gathering the Tribes (1976), was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Stanley Kunitz. Her second book, The Country Between Us (1981; UK reissue from Bloodaxe, 2019), drew on her experiences in El Salvador before and during the civil war, and won the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Her later collections have drawn upon work written over many years: The Angel of History (HarperCollins, USA; Bloodaxe Books, 1994), Blue Hour (HarperCollins, USA; Bloodaxe Books, 2003), and In the Lateness of the World (2020). Her landmark anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (Norton, 1993), was followed by Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English: 1500-2001 (Norton, 2014), edited with Duncan Wu. She is Visiting Professor at Newcastle University, and edited the anthology The Mighty Stream: Poems in celebration of Martin Luther King (Bloodaxe Books / Newcastle University, 2017) with Jackie Kay. Her memoir What You Have Heard Is True: a memoir of witness and resistance (2019) was published by Penguin at the same time as Bloodaxe's UK reissue of her 1981 collection The Country Between Us, which covers the same period as the memoir. Her translations include Mahmoud Darwish's Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (with Munir Akash, 2003), Claribel Alegría's Flowers from the Volcano (1983), and Robert Desnos's Selected Poetry (with William Kulik, 1991).