Marked and extracts from The Mystery of Prayers

by Luljeta Lleshanaku

Luljeta Lleshanaku reads a selection of poems from Haywire (Bloodaxe), translated by Henry Israeli (plus additional translators).

This book was shortlisted for the Popescu Prize 2013, judged by Karen Leeder and David Wheatley.

Luljeta Lleshanakuwas born in Elbasan, Albania in 1968. Under Enver Hoxha’s Stalinist dictatorship, she grew up under house arrest. Lleshanaku was not permitted to attend college or publish her poetry until the weakening and eventual collapse of the regime in the early 1990s. She later studied Albanian philology at the University of Tirana, and has worked as a schoolteacher, literary magazine editor and journalist. She won the prestigious International Kristal Vilenica Prize in 2009, and has had a teaching post at the University of Iowa and a fellowship from the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She has given readings in America, Europe and in Ireland at the Poetry Now Festival in Dún Laoghaire in 2010. Haywire: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2011) is her first British publication, and draws on two editions published in the US by New Directions, Fresco: Selected Poems (2002) and Child of Nature (2010), as well as a selection of newer work. It is a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation and is shortlisted for the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for poetry translated from a European language into English.