LINDITA ARAPI Comments

Lindita Arapi (born 30 June 1972 in Lushnjë, Albania) is an Albanian writer and journalist. She studied the Albanian language and literature at the University of Tirana from 1990 to 1994. Arapi then moved to Germany, and she now resides in Bonn.

In 1993, Arapi published her first book of poems. Three years later, she moved to Germany, where she studied German in Cologne. That same year,1996, she received a scholarship from the Heinrich Böll Foundation and served as an Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa. It was followed by a doctorate in journalism (or Cultural Studies) at the University of Vienna.

She is cited as a noteworthy example of a generation of female Albanian writers. Together with her contemporaries, Ervin Hatibi, Agron Tufa, and Rudian Zekthi, Arapi is one of Albania's present-day literary avant-garde writers. She has been living in Germany since the late 1990s, where she has published several volumes of poetry.

Her first book of poetry, Am Meer, nachts ('By the sea, at night'; 2007) was the first book of poetry written by a female Albanian poet in German. Her first novel, 'Vajzat me çelës në qafë' (2010) , translated into German in 2012, was awarded a Book of the Year prize in Albania. [Wikipedia]