Hanna Komar is a translator, writer and an award-winning poet. Currently, she is taking an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Westminster, London. Hanna writes about patriarchy, domestic abuse and state violence, transformation and growth through difficult experiences. She has been involved in Belarusian protest of 2020-2022 and it has become a main focus in her literary work and personal life.
Hanna’s poetry and prose have been translated into Swedish, Norwegian, German, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian, she translates her work into English. Hanna is a member of PEN Belarus and Belarusian Writers Union, as well as an honourary member of English PEN.
Residency goals
During her stay in residence in Sofia, Hanna will be working on a book-length creative non-fiction about her experience of imprisonment for a peaceful demonstration in Minsk in September 2020. The work in progress includes her diary from jail, interviews with other women and men who went through the same experience, and with their friends and families outside the prison walls. This work is very important as a document of those events showing from the inside how the protest was suppressed, how women went through imprisonment at an unprecedented scale and how immense the solidarity was.
