Lidija Dimkovska

Lidija Dimkovska (1971) is a Macedonian poet, novelist, and translator.

Lidija Dimkovska: Bio

Poet, novelist, and translator Lidija Dimkovska was born in 1971 in Skopje, North Macedonia. She took Ph.D. degree in Romanian poetry at the University of Bucharest, Romania where she worked as lecturer of Macedonian language and literature. Now she lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia and translates Romanian and Slovenian literature in Macedonian.

In her native, Macedonian language she has published seven books of poetry, four novels, one American diary, and one short stories collection. She edited an anthology of young Macedonian poetry, an anthology of contemporary Slovenian poetry in Macedonian, and two anthologies of contemporary minority and immigrant writing in Slovenia.

For her poetry she received the Macedonian award for debut (1993), the German prize »Hubert Burda« (2009), the Romanian prizes “Poesis”(2002) and “Tudor Arghezi” (2012), the European prize “Petru Krdu” (2016), the Special mention for European Cultural Heritage, for the cycle of five short stories from her book of short stories “When I Left Karl Liebknecht” (2018), the Slovenian prize “The Glass of Immortality” (2020), the Macedonian/Albanian prize “Naim Frasheri”(2020) and the Macedonian prize “Brothers Miladinov”(2021).

Her novels “Hidden Camera” (2004) and “A Spare Life” (2012) received the award of Writers’ Union of Macedonia for the best prose book of the year and “A Spare Life” received also the European Union Prize for Literature (2013). Her last novel “Personal Identity Number” (2023) received the biggest Macedonian award “Novel of the Year”.

Her work was also nominated for the Best Translated Book Award (the USA, once for poetry and once for prose), the Poet of the Freedom (Poland), the Brucke Berlin Prize (Germany), the Specimen Prize (Switzerland), the Balkanika Award, the MIRA Award (Slovenia) etc.

Her books have been translated into 16 languages (English, German, Polish, Hungarian, Slovak, Czech, Romanian, Serbian, Slovenian, French, Croatian, Italian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek and Latvian). Between 2016 and 2019  she served as the president of the jury for the international literary prize “Vilenica” in Slovenia and between 2013 and 2016 she was a member of the international jury for the international poetry award for life achievement “Herbert” in Warsaw, Poland. She has participated at numerous international literary festivals and readings and was a writer-in-residence in Iowa, London, Berlin, Vienna, Graz, Salzburg, Bucharest, Krems, Tirana, Okinawa, and Split. 

Lidija Dimkovska: Books

Grandma Non-Oui (2024)

Written as an exchange between Grandma and Nedjeljka, her granddaughter and namesake, a conversation unfolds that encompasses a broad range of times and places between 1938 to 2016, moving back and forth temporally from past to present, and geographically between Castellammare del Golfo in Sicily and Split, Croatia.

Their imagined conversations reveal the lives of these two different women and the deep cross-generational bond between them, as they discuss cross-cultural love, private life, and family, as well as the public sphere of war, politics, migration.

Lidija Dimkovska: Events