For the first time since the start of the European Poet of Freedom award, the Jury has decided to award two authors: we are delighted to inform that the 2022 European Poets of Freedom are Marianna Kiyanovska (Ukraine) with The Voices of Babyn Yar and Luljeta Lleshanaku (Albania) with Water and Coal.The translators of the selected volumes, Adam Pomorski and Dorota Horodyska, will also be awarded.
The Jury about Marianna Kiyanovska’s The Voices of Babyn Yar translated by Adam Pomorski:
“This is a song of mourning, where Kiyanovska achieves the utmost brilliant, constructing simple stories filled with individual experiences and marked by the premonition of inevitable doom. (…) This is carnal poetry, the poetry of pain and blood that elude being assigned to a specific place in time. Suffice it to change the names of people or places for the poem to immediately become terrifyingly topical as an elegy lamenting the mass graves of Bucha, Irpin and Mariupol.”
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The Jury about Luljeta Lleshanaku’s Water and Coal translated by Dorota Horodyska:
“Water and Coal is a masterpiece, full and finite. Its precise structure and extraordinary economy of words only enhance the impression of perfection. Lleshanaku’s poems poignantly describe how one strives for freedom in the enslaved world where she was born and grew up. The poet is also a polymath, combining different experiences in her work, not just her own, making her poetry universally appealing. She sounds like a pure, impeccable crystal.”
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In the film members of the Jury talk about the poetry of both winners - and why
