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Ana Blandiana was born in 1942 in Timioara, Romania. She is an almost legendary figure who holds a position in Romanian culture comparable to that of Anna Akhmatova and Vaclav Havel in Russian and Czech literature. She has published 14 books of poetry, two of short stories, nine books of essays and one novel. Her work has been translated into 24 languages published in 58 books of poetry and prose to date. In Britain a number of her earlier poems were published inThe Hour of Sand: Selected Poems 1969-1989(Anvil Press Poetry, 1989), with a later selection in versions by Seamus Heaney in John Fairleigh's contemporary Romanian anthologyWhen the Tunnels Meet(Bloodaxe Books, 1996). She was co-founder and President of the Civic Alliance from 1990, an independent non-political organisation that fought for freedom and democratic change. She also re-founded and became President of the Romanian PEN Club, and in 1993, under the aegis of the European Community, she created the Memorial for the Victims of Communism. In recognition of her contribution to European culture and her valiant fight for human rights, Blandiana was awarded the highest distinction of the French Republic, theLgion d'Honneur(2009). She has won numerous international literary awards. Paul Scott Derrick and Viorica Patea have translated all of her poetry into English. Their first translation to appear from Bloodaxe was ofMy Native Land A4(2010) in 2014. This was followed byThe Sun of Hereafter / Ebb of the Sensesin 2017, combining her two previous collections, and a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.Five Books, combining five collections, three of protest poems from the 1980s followed by her two collections of love poetry, was published in 2021. This will be followed by a further compilation from her early collections,The Shadow of Words(2025). Ana Blandiana was awarded the European Poet of Freedom Prize for 2016 by the city of Gdansk forMy Native Land A4, published in Polish in 2016, the award shared with her Polish translator Joanna Korna-Warwas.She received the Griffin Trust's Lifetime Recognition Award in 2018, and received the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature in Spain in 2024.
The Romanian Ana Blandiana is one of Europe’s greatest living poets, and she’s well served by this substantial volume containing five previously untranslated collections. Ranging across her writing life, they create a layered portrait of a complex yet consistent poetic identity. -- Fiona Sampson * The Guardian, on Five Books * …one of Europe's most important living poets. Blandiana is not concerned with elegant artifice. Her poems are mostly short in line and in length. And the voice, one of the most remarkable features of her work, is simple, calm and intimate... Yet that voice is capable of surprising and resonant shifts of focus that at times produce brilliant perspectives on her political situation, on her efforts to understand what connections are possible to spiritual forces, and late in her career on the various ways love can pervade life. -- Charles Altieri * London Magazine, on Five Books * In the tradition of Anna Akhmatova and Václav Havel, Blandiana bears witness to eastern European history while also offering visionary and meditative verse in the spirit of Emily Dickinson and Rainer Maria Rilke... Thanks to Derrick and Patea’s faithful rendering of Blandiana’s formal innovations in light of the poems’ evolving context, Five Books will ensure Blandiana’s legacy as a poet with international significance. -- J. Rhett Forman * World Literature Today *
