For Kjorveziroska, writing is a craft endeavor – a handiwork with the threads of fiction, threaded through the needles of faction. In her hands, words become magical tools.
Biography
Olivera Kjorveziroska (1965) was born in Kumanovo. She completed her primary and secondary education in her hometown, and later graduated from the Faculty of Philology in Skopje, where she now lives and works as an editor.
She is the author of the following books: “Third Floor” and “The Tall Whites” (poetry); “The Little Bun Mirna” and “My Brother from the Thirteenth Floor” (children’s novels); “Grandpa Mile” and “Zorki and Cvetka” (picture books for children); “Do Dreams Open Up Work”, “One Text and One Woman” and “Halfway” (criticism and essays); “Lou’s Locked Body”, “Ab’t” and “Three Marias” (novels for adults); “The Sorrows of the Young Proofreader”, “(En)twined Stories”, “Two Pillows”, “(Sewn) Stories”, “Sugar-Free Short Stories”, “The Streets That Do Not Exist” and “Leap Years” (short stories for adults).
Her works have been included in some twenty anthologies of contemporary Macedonian short stories, published both at home and abroad. Her stories have been translated into English, French, Hungarian, Albanian, Czech, Serbian, Bulgarian, Slovenian, Polish, Russian, German, and Greek.
She is a multiple recipient of significant short story awards in Macedonia, and for “Entwined Stories” in 2003 she received the “Stale Popov” Award for Best Prose from the Society of Writers of Macedonia. In 2025, she received the “Racin Award” for her latest novel “Three Marias”. She is a member of the MWA and of the Macedonian PEN Center.
Outstanding title:
(SEWN) STORIES (2003)
“(Sewn) Stories by one of the most striking contemporary Macedonian storytellers, Olivera Kjorveziroska, demonstrates how one can narrate pain and joy, hope and despair, tears and laughter, through the intertwining of sewing and writing – when both thread and word are threaded through the needle. The very manner in which the author tells her stories reflects certain masterful sewing stitches, so they are not ‘just’ told, but told/sewn/stiched together.”
– Goce Smilevski, author and critic
No. of pp: 170
Awards and honors:
- “Stale Popov” Award for Best Prose from the Society of Writers of Macedonia (2003)
Rights:
Olivera Kjorveziroska
olivera.kjorveziroska@gmail.com
+389 70 300 580
Latest title:
THREE MARIAS (2025)
“Three Marias” is a carefully conceived homage to Slavko Janevski, which is neither a classical dedication nor a remake of a specific work. The novel contains three independent stories about three different women who share the same name – Maria – and who wish to abandon their current lives because of a sinful love, whether their own or someone else’s.
Although it is a contemporary novel set in our time and in our micro-space (Skopje), it incorporates folk customs from northeastern Macedonia: adorning the groom with money, burying the deceased with a doll, as well as the wedding “mavile” from the Veles region. Folkloric rituals, beliefs and superstitions, tragic destinies, fates and karasevda (fatal passion) are motifs that, in a certain sense, “justify” the subtitle of the novel – a basma novel (a novel-spell).
No. of pp: 155
Awards and honors:
- “Racin Award” (2025)
Rights:
Ars Lamina – Publications
rights@arslamina.com
+389 (0) 2 3124 227