The author of seven poetry collections, Luljeta Lleshanaku was born in Elbasan, Albania, in 1968, and grew up under house arrest during Enver.
Luljeta Lleshanaku is an Albanian poet, born in Elbasan in 1968..
On Luljeta Lleshanaku
Luljeta Lleshanaku is an Albanian poet, born in Elbasan in 1968. Following the death of Enver Hoxha in 1985 and the end of dictatorship in Albania in 1990, she was belatedly allowed to attend university, and has worked – multitasking, in the manner of gifted people in small populations – as a teacher, magazine editor, journalist and screenwriter.
Currently she is research director at the Institute of Studies of Communist Genocide in Albania, which one wishes for the author’s sake might be a sinecure, but almost certainly isn’t. Her eight books of poetry have been digested into three in the US, Fresco (2002), Child of Nature (2010) and the newly appeared Negative Space; meanwhile, Bloodaxe give us the same poems, introduction and afterword in just two volumes, the double-strength Haywire (2011) and the textidentisch Negative Space (Bloodaxe, £12).
Earlier Lleshanaku poems were done by the pioneering Henry Israeli