Belarusian Poetess Has Won A Prestigious European Prize And Is Aiming For Another Award
- 24.05.2026, 11:58
Yulia Timofeeva participated in the mass peaceful protests of 2020.
Belarusian poetess Yulia Timofeeva is a contender to win one of the main German prizes for contemporary translated literature - Internationaler Literaturpreis. Her book "Krovazvarot" has been shortlisted for this prize, writes "Mirror".
"I weave my history from the fish, / from the abrasions, from the cavalcades, from the lapels of memory I weave my history from the fish, / from the abrasions, from the cavalcades, From the paws of memory" - written in exile, Julia Timofeeva's cycle of poems is a formally disconnected project of memory, tracing the history of her Belarusian family over a century - from Belarus to Western Europe and Canada.
Timofeeva turns to a variety of genres - letters, photographs, questionnaires, and prose poems - to make sense of the experiences of forced labor, displacement, and the Chernobyl disaster, as well as the milestones of her own exile and linguistic eradication. She sews up the gaps in history with the "needle of the poem," re-routing trajectories again and again, weaving together times and places. No matter how "worn, frayed and faded" memory may be - in Blutkreislauf, the Belarusian poet questions the individual and collective memory of the 20th century and confronts oblivion with many voices - in a sensitive and accurate translation by Tina Wünschmann," the award's website notes.
Buy "Krovazvarot" here (don't do it if you live in Belarus. The publishing house "Yanushkevich", where the book was published, is recognized as extremist).
This is the second Belarusian book to be shortlisted for the Internationaler Literaturpreis. Three years ago it was the work "What Are You Doing, Witch?" by Eva Vezhnovets in translation.
The winner of the prize will be announced in July 2026.
"It was unbearable to describe the next days." We talked to the Belarusian woman whose "Diary" about 2020 was published in multiple countries
In April of this year, Timofeeva received the prestigious German literary prize Hilde-Domin-Preis as an author who works with the theme of exile.
Yulia Timofeeva participated in mass peaceful protests. In the fall of 2020 she emigrated from the country and lives in Germany.