Macedonia 🇲🇰
Lidija Dimkovska was born in 1971 in Skopje. She is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. She studied Comparative Literature at the University of Skopje and took a PhD in Romanian Literature at the University of Bucharest, Romania. She has worked as a lecturer of Macedonian language and literature at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest, and as a lecturer of World Literature at the University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia. Since 2001 she has been living in Ljubljana, Slovenia, as a freelance writer and translator of Romanian and Slovenian literature into Macedonian. She has participated at numerous international literary festivals and was a writer-in-residence in Iowa, Berlin, Graz, Split, Vienna, Salzburg, Tirana, and London.
She has published seven collections of poetry, four novels and one collection of short stories, translated into numerous languages. She received the prize for a debut poetic work, the WAM's Stale Popov prize twice, the German Hubert Burda prize, the Romanian Poesis and Tudor Arghezi prizes, the European Petru Krdu prize, the European Union Prize for Literature, the Special recognition European Cultural Heritage, the Slovenian Cup of Immortality, the Albanian-Macedonian Naim Frasheri, the Brothers Miladinovci award and others. Her books were also nominated for the American award Best Book in Translation, for the German Berlin Bridge, for the Polish European Poet of Freedom and for the international Balkanika. She edited four anthologies.
National Identification Number
You exist if you have a NIN.
Home should not be a secret place, nor a saltshaker. Nor a refuge, because you shouldn't be a fugitive within it. You should be the name, not the number. There is no greater rejection than being a guest in your own home.
There comes a time in life when everything suddenly spills over you and engulfs you. Relationships fall apart, the essential things that remained buried in years of silence turn into dust... Moments when you can no longer breathe in the cramped apartment, when you're so lonely and estranged from the people who are supposed to be close to you that you simply have to leave somewhere in order not to lose yourself. But where to go then, which wilderness to seize in order to rebuild the world within yourself?
An awakening novel about our world that we forgot to love. A touching story about the dehumanization of humanity. A novel in search of the utopia of identity through the dystopia of life.