Luljeta Lleshanaku

Luljeta Lleshanaku is the current Poet Laureate of Albania (2023-2025). Among other things she is also a poet, researcher, journalist, screenwriter, and magazine editor. 

Growing up under the Stalinist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, Lleshanaku was not allowed to study at university. After the dictatorship’s fall in 1990 she studied Albanian Philology and Literature at the University of Tirana and later graduated with an MFA from Warren Wilson College, USA. She has been awarded fellowships at the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa in 1999, as well as at the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada in 2008. 

Lleshanaku’s poetry has been described as innovative and unique, disconnected from American and European tradition as well as Albanian convention, reflecting the literary isolation she experienced growing up. According to Lleshanaku herself, the American aesthetic and the philosophy of a continuous tradition made up of a multitude of individuals is alien to her and her culture. Similarly, the poet and critic Michael Hofmann points out that her poems carry in mind neither critic nor reader, making them transcendent of time and culture, as her critic and editor Peter Constantine notes as well. The tone of her poems is tactile and multifaceted, at times critical and honest, at other times humorous or melancholic. 

Luljeta Lleshanaku’s nine poetry collections have been awarded several prizes, including the Silver Pen 2000 by the Albanian Ministry of Culture, the Tirana Book Fair Award in 2013, and the PEN Albania in 2016. In 2022, she was named European Poet of Freedom. Her work has been translated into French, English, German, and Slovakian, among other languages. Lleshanaku lives in Tirana and works as the research director at the Institute for the Studies of Communist Genocide.