photo © Ondrej Lipár

Marie Iljašenko [Czech Republic]

Marie Iljašenko was born in 1983 in Kyiv, Ukraine into a family of Czech-Polish descent. She is a Czech poet, writer and translator.In 1992 her family moved to the Czech Republic, where she grew up in the Sudeten Broumov region and later graduated from Charles University in Prague, majoring in Comparative Literature and East-European Studies. Her collection of poems Osip míří na jih (tr: Osip Heads South) was published in Czech in 2015 and won critical acclaim. The collection was most recently published in Poland (2022), where it was similarly well received. It was nominated for the Magnesia Litera Prize for Discovery of the Year. She has also been nominated for the Dresdener Literature Prize (2015) and the Václav Burian Prize (2016).Her second book of poetry, Sv. Outdoor (tr: St. Outdoor), was published in 2019. Her poems have been featured in, among others, the anthology Nejlepší české básně (Best Czech Poetry) in 2013, 2014 and 2017, the Polish anthology Sąsiadki (2020), the Spanish anthology Antología de poesía checa contemporánea (2021). Her writings are translated into English, German, French, Polish, Spanish, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Slovenian, Romanian, and Japanese. Her poetry was set to music by French composer Philippe Manoury and young Czech composer Soňa Vetchá. Most recently (2023) she won the Tom Stoppard Prize for her essay I’m Local Everywhere Around Here. In addition, she translates from Ukrainian and Polish (e.g., Jury Andruchovych, Olena Huseinova, Dmytro Lazutkin, Halyna Kruk, Iya Kiva, Taras Prokhasko; e.g., Anna Adamowicz, Zofia Bałdyga, Urzsula Honek, Agata Jabłońska, Iwona Witkowska, Urszula Zajączkowska, etc.) and works as an editor for DOX Centre for Contemporary Art. The author lives in Prague.