Luljeta Lleshanaku

Luljeta Lleshanaku was born in Elbasan, Albania. She grew up under house arrest during Enver Hoxha’s Stalinist regime. Lleshanaku has worked as a lecturer, literary magazine editor, journalist, and screenwriter, and is currently the research director at Tirana’s Institute of Studies of Communist Genocide. She is the author of eight poetry collections published in Albania. Her books have received many national and international awards and have been translated into several languages. The collections Fresco: Selected Poetry (2002), Child of Nature (2010), and Negative Space (2018) were published by New Directions. In 2018, Negative Space was nominated for a PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.