Mimoza Ahmeti (b. 1963) from Kruja is one of the 'enfants terribles' of the nineties, who set about to expand the horizons and explore the possibilities offered to her by her own senses. Dragging the nation, in her idiosyncratic manner, along the bumpy road to Europe, she has managed in recent years to provoke Albania’s impoverished and weary society into much needed reflection which, with time, may lead to new and more sincerely human values. After two volumes of verse in the late eighties, it was the fifty-three poems in the collection Delirium, Tirana 1994 (Delirium), which caught the public's attention. Mimoza Ahmeti's poetry has been well received by the new generation of readers in tune, for the first time, with Western culture. Her candid expressions of wide-eyed feminine desire and indulgence in sensual pleasures, and the crystalline fluidity of her language have already made of her a modern classic. The traditional polarization of male and female verse would seem to dissolve under the passionate force of her quill.

Translator Robert Elsie (Vancouver, Canada, 1950) is a leading specialist in Albanian affairs. He is the author of thirty-five books on Albania and its culture, including literary translations from Albanian, and of many articles and research papers. Elsie studied at the University of British Columbia, graduating in 1972 with a degree in classical studies and linguistics. In the following years, he did postgraduate research at the Free University of Berlin, the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and the University of Paris IV in Paris, the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in Ireland and the University of Bonn, where he finished his doctorate in 1978 at the Linguistics Institute. From 1982 to 1987, he was employed by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bonn. Since that time he has worked as a freelance writer and conference interpreter, primarily for Albanian and German. He lives in the Eifel Mountains of Germany, not far from the Belgian border.

Weblinks:   www.elsie.de and www.albanianliterature.com