Photo: Sasho Dimoski
Poetry as amalgam, connection, and transmission between tradition and the new Macedonian poetry being written today; a poetics that synthesizes past experiences and reshapes them into a renewed poetic vision.
Biography
Poet, essayist, translator, and anthologist Sllave Gjorgjo Dimoski was born in 1959 in Velestovo, Ohrid, Macedonia. He has published seventeen poetry collections, four books of essays, and six books for children. He has edited two anthologies (anthology of Macedonian love and erotic poetry and anthology of Macedonian wine poetry) and co-authored thirteen additional anthologies and thematic selections.
He received the Award for Debut Poetry Book (1981), followed by numerous national and international prizes, including the Miladinov Brothers Award, St. Clement of Ohrid – Patron of Ohrid Award (twice), the Aco Šopov Award, the Antevo Pero Award, the Grigor Prličev Award, and the Literary Sceptre. He also received international recognitions such as the Seven Secretaries of SKOJ Award (Croatia), the Grand Prix International (Romania), and the Sergei Yesenin Award (Russia). In 2024 he was honored with the Macedonian State Prize 23 October for lifetime achievement. His poetry has been the subject of academic research, including a Master’s thesis in Italy (2015), and a major 370-page critical volume (2023).
His books have been translated into English (4), Serbian (6), Bulgarian (3), Russian (2), and individually into Polish, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, Mongolian, and Azerbaijani. Selected poems have appeared in more than thirty languages. As a translator, he has introduced over thirty poets from Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Russian, and Montenegrin literature into Macedonian.
Outstanding title:
DARK PLACE (1999)
The language in Dark Place becomes, in Heidegger’s sense, a “speech of being”: by carrying the dark depth of existence to the shore of the Poem, it itself grows dark – a dark place of the human as a being condemned to Poetry. The poems flash with vivid sensory images of reality, only to slip into the twilight zone of dream, heavy with hidden secrets. They resonate as deep memories, a mental echo of the dark place – life.
No. of pp: 86
Awards and honors:
- Highest national “Miladinov Brothers” poetry award at the International Struga Poetry Evenings festival (2000)
Latest title:
TODAY (2024)
The long poem Today achieves profound insights and resonates with contemporary concerns, discreetly engaging several key topoi, including post-humanism, mass hazard (the gambling with the fate of the world), migration, epidemics, and current wars, which we now witness directly on television screens. Yet this singing – the “epochal” resonance of the lyric-epic voice – does not unfold in a mere journalistic manner; but through a personally ennobled (intimate) discourse – through relentless self-examination (and cynical self-exposure) of one’s identity, as well as of the current existential burden across the world; through an open confrontation with the dilemma (the uncertainty) of self-perception and the perception of the Other (“is each of us an unasked question?”).
No. of pp: 64
Awards and honors:
- “Grigor Prlichev” Award for best unpublished poem (2024)
Rights:
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