Luljeta Lleshanaku represents Albania in Poetry Parnassus

TIRANA, June 27 – Luljeta Lleshanaku is representing Albania in the Poetry Parnassus, the largest ever global gathering of poets being held in London from June 26 to July 1. Just before the start of the festival, she was featured in a BBC article along with two other Indian and Ugandan poets.
“My poem in the Parnassus anthology is called No Time. It’s about my uncle, one of the leaders of the anti-communist resistance, who was executed on 31 December 1950. They left his body exposed in the centre of the city as a warning to others. It was a very brutal gesture. He had three children and they were made to see it. He was considered one of the most dangerous enemies of the system. He doesn’t have a grave,” Lleshanaku told the BBC.
“Only 20 years ago, I couldn’t have imagined travelling to the UK and taking part in an event like the Poetry Parnassus. When I was in school none of my classmates asked me what I wanted to study in the future because they knew that I was not allowed to go to college. I was not allowed to publish, to have a public life. We couldn’t leave the house. I was only allowed to work in a factory or on a co-operative farm,” says the writer.
“I don’t feel I missed out too much as a writer as I was only 23 when the political system changed in 1991. I was probably not ready to have a serious publication. But I know what it means to grow up without a sense of future. I am a survivor, my people are survivors.”
Luljeta Lleshanaku was born in Elbasan, Albania in 1968. Under Enver Hoxha’s Stalinist dictatorship she grew up under house arrest.
Winner of the prestigious International Kristal Vilenica Prize (2009), she belongs to the first “post-totalitarian” generation of Albanian poets, but is a ‘completely original poetƨer poetry has little connection to poetic styles past or present in America, Europe, or the rest of the worldƩt is not connected to anything in Albanian poetry either’ (Peter Constantine).
She has worked as a schoolteacher, literary magazine editor and journalist. Haywire: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books 2011) is her first British publication.