Dragana Evtimova

- North Macedonia -

Dragana Evtimova was born on 13.03.1984 in Skopje, the Republic of Macedonia. She is a professor of Macedonian and South Slavic literature and Slovenian language, with a degree from “Blazhe Koneski” Faculty of Philology at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, the Republic of Macedonia. She graduated as a translator of Slovenian language and literature from the Faculty of Philosophy at the University in Ljubljana. She has a Master’s degree in Culturology from the Institute of Macedonian literature in Skopje.

 

She has published the following books: The Existence of the Dynamics (poetry, 2005), submitted to an anonymous contest, which received an award from the Students’ Union at “Blazhe Koneski” Faculty of Philology, Skopje; I Am Somewhere Else (poetry, 2011); Footnotes by Memory (poetry, 2014); See You Soon. E. (an epistolary novel, written in collaboration with the visual artist Vladimir Lukash, 2017, and translated into Bulgarian) and The Distance between Two Points (haiku, 2018). Some of her poetry was published in the Serbian magazine “Rukopisi,” in the anthology “Ван кутије,” in the Bosnian literary magazine “Riječ,” the Slovenian magazine “Slovenské pohl’ady,” the Taiwanese anthology arranged by the PEN center in Taipei, the poetry festival “Ditet e namit” in Prizren and Pristina, where she received the award for the best poetry between two festivals; she was also published in the Slovenian magazine “Poetikon,” as well as in the Macedonian anthologies “The Wind Brings Fair Weather,” “Decameron,” “The New Macedonian Haiku Wave,” “100 Thousand Poets for a Change,” and “Voices of the New Age”) and in web portals. She has participated in numerous festivals, such as: “The Struga Poetry Evenings festival,” “Karamanov Poetry Gatherings,” “Racin Poetry Gatherings,” “The Slavic assembly of young Slavists” in Zagreb, Sarajevo and Ljubljana. She won a writing residency from the Writers’ Association in Ljubljana, in May, 2016. Together with the Maltese poet Antoine Cassar and the Slovenian poet Peter Semolic she coordinates the international project “Spread Poetry, Not Fear,” whereas with Vladimir Lukash they are working on the project “Dialogue in a Frame” where poetry is combined with a picture in a manner of surrogates. On the front side of each surrogate there is a short message, and on the back there is a poem’s excerpt; the goal is to create a cross construction and to make an attempt to put together a message. It is a social experiment aiming to experiment with different pieces of writing and to create a consciousness for cross reading of pictures and texts. She is a member of the Macedonian Writers’ Association. She actively translates literary works from Slovenian.