Nikola Madzirov (poet, essayist, and translator) was born into a family of Balkan War refugees in Macedonia, ex-Yugoslavia, in 1973. When he was 18, the collapse of Yugoslavia prompted a shift in his sense of identity. There is a clear line connecting the generation of the East European poets like Czesław Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Vasko Popa and Adam Zagajewski to Nikola Madzirov. However, Madzirov provides a new voice in 21st century European poetry and is one of the most outstanding poets of the post-Soviet generation. The German weekly magazine Der Spiegel has compared the quality of Madzirov’s poetry to Tomas Tranströmer’s. The Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun wrote: “Madzirov created loud silence. He brought back the space and peace to the power. There are times (now) when we long after exactly this kind of purity.” The Polish poet Adam Zagajewski describes how “Madzirov’s poems are like Expressionist paintings: filled with thick, energetic streaks they seem to emerge from the imagination and to return to it right away, like night animals caught in the headlights of a car.”
尼古拉‧馬茲洛夫，詩人，散文家，譯者，1973年生於前南斯拉夫的馬其頓，出身於一個巴爾干戰爭的難民家庭。十八歲時，南斯拉夫解體，文化身份發生了轉變。馬茲洛夫的詩歌被翻譯成四十種語言出版，其中《重置的石頭》（2007）曾贏得「Hubert Burda歐洲詩歌獎」，也曾在斯特魯加詩歌之夜獲得「米拉迪諾夫兄弟詩歌獎」，還獲得數個文學獎金，包括愛荷華大學「國際作家工作坊」、柏林「DAAD文學獎金」、法國「瑪格麗特‧尤瑟娜文學獎金」等等。馬茲洛夫也是Lyrikline詩歌網站的主持，常年四海為家。斯洛文尼亞詩人薩拉蒙曾對馬茲洛夫的詩作出如下評論：「馬茲洛夫創造高昂的沉默，把空間與和平重新灌注到力量之中。我們一直以來都追尋著這種純粹。」波蘭詩人扎加耶夫斯基亦有以下評論：「馬茲洛夫的詩就像表現主義的畫，有厚實而充滿活力的線條，似乎來自於想像，又立刻回到想像，就像夜晚被車燈照到的動物。」