Poetry and freedom in Belarus
Conversation and poetry reading with Dimiter Kenarov and Hanna Komar

➠ November 24, 19:30, MAZE Club, 1 Hristo Belchev St

In 2011, writer, poet and journalist Dimiter Kenarov (Bulgaria) travelled to Belarus to author an article about the former Soviet republic through the symbolic prism of the Belarusian tractor.

In 2020, poet and activist Hanna Komar (Belarus) participated in peaceful demonstrations in Minsk against the presidential election results. Both were arrested: Kenarov was held in solitary confinement for five days, and Komar spent nine days in prison with other political prisoners who ended up calling each other 'sisters'.

On November 24 at 19:30, Hana Komar and Dimitar Kenarov will hold a conversation in MAZE Club about writing and protest, solitude and solidarity during arrest, and the political situation in Belarus.

➠ Join the Facebook event 

The discussion will be in English, and the two will also read their selected poetry in Belarusian, Bulgarian and English. Hanna’s poetry will be translated to Bulgarian by translator and poet Asya Grigorova.

Hanna Komar is an activist, translator and acclaimed poet. She took part in the protests in Belarus in 2020-2022, which later became a central theme in her creative work. She studies personal transformation and growth through difficult experiences, as well as patriarchy, domestic abuse and state violence. As a resident at the Sofia Literature and Translation House Hanna is working on a book-length creative non-fiction about the peaceful demonstrations in Minsk and her subsequent arrest in 2020. The work in progress includes her diary from jail, interviews with women and men who went through the same experience and with their friends and families outside the prison walls.

Dimiter Kenarov is a freelance journalist, poet, literary critic, and translator. His English-language writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Outside, The Nation, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, among many others. His work has also been anthologized three times in The Best American Travel Writing series and has been twice labeled “notable” in The Best American Non-Required Reading. He is currently working on a biography of the Bulgarian writer, journalist and political dissident Georgi Markov.

--
The event is part of Hanna Komar's residency stay at the Sofia Literature and Translation House that is realised in partnership with S. Fischer Stiftung.