Lina Kazakova
Lily doesn’t sleep
Editor: Raman Romaŭ
Illustration: Uładzimir Ściapan, “Outskirts”
hochroth Minsk
Berlin, 2025
ISBN 978-3-949850-74-5
Lina Kazakova is a poet, teacher, editor, and translator. She was born in Minsk. She graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of the Belarusian state university (1994), and from the European humanities university with master’s degree (2003). She’s the author of the collection of poems “Рукавица” (“Glove”, 2013). Her poetry has been published in such collections as “Минская школа” (“Minsk School”), “Антология современного белорусского верлибра” (“Anthology of the contemporary Belarusian vers libre”), “Анталогiя сучаснай беларускай жаночай паэзii” (“Anthology of the contemporary Belarusian women’s poetry”), “Il mondo è finito e noi invece no” (“The world has ended but we haven’t”), as well as in such magazines as “Такая”, “Перекрестки”, “Монолог”, “Various Artists”. Kazakova now lives in the USA.
The central theme of her poetry is Minsk as the city between the Soviet past and the painful present of the contemporary Belarus, the place of childhood and growing up, the place of both support and loss. In her poems, the city becomes the reflection for the experience of the whole generation, that lives through the time of change and tries to preserve its identity among the tumultous events of the recent years.