Afrodita Nikolova

- North Macedonia -

 

Afrodita Nikolova is an award-winning Macedonian poet with an Aromanian background, a European poetry slam finalist, spoken word educator and an arts-based researcher. Afrodita has performed across the Balkans, the UK’s Hammer & Tongue, international poetry festivals in Italy and Sweden, experimental collaborations with live coding in England and the Swedish metaphor wrestling scene. Following her first poetry collection entitled “Bewitching” (won national prize “Lesnovo Bells”, 2010), her work appeared in various literary magazines and anthologies across the Balkans, England and the US. A Balkan poetry slam winner (2014), Afrodita represented Macedonia at the World poetry slam championship, Paris (2015). The same year Nikolova also won the Struga Poetry Evenings’ poetry prize “Enhalon” awarded for the best poem performed by a young Macedonian poet at the festival. Latest poetry appeared in the journal on Departures in Critical Qualitative Research (University California Press, 2016), Mantis (Stanford Journal, 2017), and in a co-authored chapter in Arts-based Methods and Organizational Learning book (Springer International Publishing, 2017).

 

Afrodita has worked as a teacher, a university lecturer, and artistic director in Macedonia, having also co-founded and co-edited the literary magazine “Sh” in her home country. Afrodita has facilitated spoken word poetry workshops in universities, schools, prisons and the community, for the Balkan region as well as England, Belgium and Lithuania. Currently based in England, Afrodita created a new Spoken Word Poetry Programme with young offenders in a Macedonian prison. This project forms a part of her PhD at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge (Gates Cambridge scholarship), where she’s been organising Arts Kaleidoscope, an arts-based research performance event for the past four years.