|
Lindita Arapi (c) Dittrich Verlag
|
Lindita Arapi (born in Lushnjë in 1972) is one of Albania’s most prominent contemporary writers. She has been writing poems since the 1990s, and in 2010 she published her first novel, Vazjat me çelës. She began studying in Tirana, then moved to Germany in 1996 and studied German, English and Education in Cologne. In the same year she received a writer’s fellowship from the Heinrich Böll Foundation and was Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa. She lives in Bonn, where she works as a freelance editor for the Deutsche Welle reporting mainly on Balkan cultural and political issues. She translates German writers into Albanian, including Günter Grass, Felicitas Hoppe and Marion Poschmann. Her own poems are determined by the questions of identity and otherness. Her texts have been translated into German and Italian.
Lindita Arapi is actively committed to the process of coming to terms with the legacy of Albania’s Communist past and in 2015 initiated a call to the Albanian parliament to open the files from the period of the Communist dictatorship. It was signed by more than 100 intellectuals all over Europe, including Marianne Birthler and Durs Grünbein.
Publications (poetry):
Am Meer, nachts, 2007
Shenjat e dorës.2006
Melodi te heshtjes.1998
Ndodhi në shpirt. 1995
Kufomë lulesh.1993