Xhevdet Bajraj

Xhevdet Bajraj is an ethnic Albanian Kosovar poet, dramatist and translator living in Mexico. He was deported from Kosovo in 1999, and through the International Parliament of Writers he was granted asylum at the Casa Refugio Citlaltepetl in Mexico City. Bajraj has published over fifteen volumes of poetry, in both Albanian and Spanish, and his work has been translated into nine languages. He is a two-time winner of the Kosovo Writers’ Society’s award for best book of poetry (1993 and 2000) and has also been awarded the Goliardos International Prize for Poetry (2004) and the Katarina Josipi award for best original drama written in Albanian (2010). The poems translated here were first published in the anthologies Copa ime e qiellit / Mi cachito de cielo [My Own Shred of Sky] (2015) and Cuatro patrias [Rosewater] (2017). The translations were first published in the chapbook We Fall Like Children (Egret, 2018).