IN MEMORIAM: Macedonian poet and academic Bogomil Gjuzel
It is with great sadness that we share the news that the Macedonian poet and academic Bogomil Gjuzel passed away on 22 April 2021.
University American College Skopje had the honor to welcome Mr. Gjuzel as a guest lecturer in 2009. He selflessly shared his long experience in literary translation from English into Macedonian with the students of the UACS School of Foreign Languages.
We express our condolences to Mr. Gjuzel’s family.
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Bogomil Gjuzel (1939-2021) was a poet, translator, literary critic, playwright, essayist and a member of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He worked as playwright and dramatist at Dramski Teatar Skopje (1966-1971, 1985-1998). He participated in the International Writing Program in Iowa City, USA in 1972/73, and in many poetry festivals, including Rotterdam (1978, 1996), San Francisco (1980), Herleen (1991), Maastricht and Valencia (2000). He is one of the founders of the Independent Writers of Macedonia Association in 1994 and its first chairman; he also served as editor-in-chief of its bi-monthly journal Nashe Pismo. From 1999 to 2004, he was a director of the international festival Struga Poetry Evenings.
Poetry books: Mead (1962, 1971), Alchemical Rose (1963), Libation Bearers (1966) – awarded with Brothers Miladinovci Prize for the best book of the year, Odysseus in Hell (a selection, 1969), A Well in Time (1972) – Brothers Miladinovci Award; The Wheel of the Year (1977), Reality is All (1980), State of Siege (1981), Empty Space (1982), Darkness and Milk (1986), and in Serbo-Croatian in 1987 – Aleksa Santic Yugoslav Award for 1985-88, Destroying the Wall (1989), Selected Poems (1991), Naked Life (1994), Chaos (1998), She/It (a long poem, 2000), Selected Poetry (1962-2002) (2002); Selections in Serbo-Croatian: Sky, Earth and Sun (1963), Mead (1972), bilingual Poems (1981); Selection in Slovenian: The Fish of Sense (1985); Selections in English: Three (1972), The Wreckage Reconsidered (Chattanooga Chapbooks, Tennessee, 1997), The Wolf at the Door (Xenos books, California, USA, 2001). His poems have been included in practically all anthologies of Macedonian and Yugoslav poetry since 1963.
Other books: History as Step-mother (essays, 1969), The Whole World is a House (travelogues from Ireland and USA, 1975), Mytho-Stories (three plays, 1982), Legends (stories, 1984), A Bundle (essays, 2003), with Ljubisha Georgievski Black (a tragic farce, 1989).
He translated and adapted numerous plays from English, among which: W. Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1969), King Lear (1972), Hamlet (1980), Julius Caesar (1981), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1984), Twelfth Night (1985), Troilus and Cressida and The Tempest (1992), and Titus Andronicus (1994); Bond’s Saved, O’Neil’s The Long Journey into the Night, Sheppard’s Buried Child, Pinter’s Lover; Selected poetry by: T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Ch. Simic (1984), E. Dickinson (1986), and S. Heaney (2001). He has translated and co-edited (with Louis Simpson and Serge Fauchereau) an anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (1978, revised in 1999).
