Lidija Dimkovska

Lidija Dimkovska, b. 1971 in Skopje, Northern Macedonia, is a poet and author who translates Slovenian and Romanian literature into Macedonian. She has lived in Ljubljana since 2001 and has published six poetry books, three novels, a travel story and a collection of short stories. Her works have been translated into many languages. Lidija Dimkovska is also the recipient of numerous Macedonian and international awards, including the Macedonian Debut of the Year Award, the Macedonian Writers’ Association Award for Best Prose Work of the Year (for her first two novels, A Spare Life and Hidden Camera) and the Romanian awards for poetry Poesis and Tudor Arghezi; at the broader international level, she received the Hubert-Burda-Preis für junge Lyrik (awarded to young Eastern European poets), the Peter Krdu Prize for Poetry, the recognition for the European Year of Cultural Heritage for her short story “Koga zaminav od Karl Libknekht” (“When I left Karl Liebknecht”) and, in Slovenia, the Cup of Immortality in recognition of her outstanding Slovenian poetry of the past decade.

To date, two of her collections have been published in Alexander Sitzmann’s German translations: Anständiges Mädchen and Schwarz auf weiß. In 2013, Dimkovska received the European Union Literary Prize for Literature for her novel A Spare Life, in addition to which the Macedonian newspaper Nova Makedonija also named her literary Personality of the Year.