Description

“…I want to understand what connects my Europe to the one in which I live, connects not only now, but also in the past, when I wasn’t there yet, and the threads of my lineage were already tying themselves into knots on its map. I look for them to recreate the history of my family, to combine it into a single canvas with the stories I knew from my childhood, to make my own life a part of it.”

Yuliya Cimafiejeva – writer and translator. She is the author of four volumes of poetry in Belarusian and the documentary book “Minsk Diary,” written in English and translated into six languages. Her poems have appeared in separate editions in the US, Germany and Poland, and have been published in numerous Belarusian and foreign magazines and anthologies.

Cimafieyeva’s translations have been used to publish books of poetry by Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, Paul Celan, Enheduanna and others, as well as children’s books by Maja Lunde and Stian Hole. For her translation of Stephen Crane’s volume of poetry, she was awarded the Carlos Sherman Prize.

Since the end of 2020, the author has lived in exile in Europe. She has been a DAAD (Artists-in-Berlin Program) fellow since 2025.