What Is It Like?

A collection of poetry in translation from Lidija Dimkovska, a poet and novelist from North Macedonia living in Slovenia. Born in 1971, Lidija writes in Macedonian. She has published six books of poetry, three novels, one American diary and one collection of short stories which have been awarded and translated into 15 languages (English, German, Polish, Hungarian, Slovak, Czech, Romanian, Serbian, Slovenian, French, Croatian, Italian, Albanian, Bulgarian and Latvian). She has participated at numerous international literary festivals (Princeton Poetry Festival, Stockholm, Rotterdam, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Vilnius, Manchester, Chicago, Zagreb, Vilenica, Medana, Struga, Leipzig, Lido Adriano, Manchester, Kazan, Dresden, Taipei, Cork, Warsaw, Berlin, etc.) and was a writer-in-residence in London, Berlin, Iowa, Vienna, Graz, Salzburg, Krems, Tirana, and Split.

“Exemplary and haunting, Lidija Dimkovska, who is one of the leading writers of south-east Europe, writes like no-one else. In this Selected Poems (from both of her last books), impeccably translated, we hear the gritty edge to her intelligent compassion, the way she interweaves fantasy and bitter experience, and how her searching poetic gaze hunts down difficult truths. Every one of these poems is a challenge we should rise to.” - Fiona Sampson

“These poems display courage and resilience, they are honest and uncompromising, characteristics that have always been present in the poetry of Lidija Dimkovska.” - Goce Smilevski, writer and literary researcher at the Institute of Macedonian Literature, Skopje.