Gjoko Zdraveski
Macedonia
Gjoko Zdraveski is born in 1985 in Skopje. He graduated and got his mastеr’s degree at the Department of Macedonian Literature and South Slavic Literatures at the Faculty of Philology "Blaže Koneski" – Skopje. He worked as a lecturer in Macedonian language at the Faculty of Philosophy in Niš, Serbia, as an editor at the publishing houses "Begemot" and "Templum", as a librarian at the Department of Macedonian Language and South Slavic Languages at the Faculty of Philology in Skopje, and as an editor he also collaborated with internet portals "Reper", "Blesok" and "Okno". From June 2014 to June 2018, together with Ana Golejška, he organized the literary festival "Astal Projections" in "Menada". He published four books of poetry, all in the "Ognovi" edition of the publishing house "Antolog". His poetry has been published in ten European languages. Since 2015, he has been part of the European poetry platform "Versopolis". In 2019, the publishing house "Begemot" published the book of short stories "Sections Reality". So far, he has translated a dozen books from Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian into Macedonian language. Today he works as a Macedonian language lecturer at INALCO in Paris.
Ljubavina
The manuscript "Ljubavina" by Gjoko Zdraveski is a collection of love poetry of about seventy pages, divided into three cycles. The songs from all three cycles mainly sing about disembodied love, about love as a transition, about love as a way of being and as a way to know the world. Although seemingly abstract, the inspiration of the lyrical subject always comes directly from physical reality. The title itself is a neologism, which contains love and beauty. Language plays are frequent in the book, a procedure characteristic of Zdraveski's poetry.