Bogomil Gjuzel

Bogomil Gjuzel (1939 – 2021) poet, prose writer, playwright, essayst, translator. Born in 1939 in Čačak, Serbia. Graduated at the Department of English, University of Skopje, in 1963, and spent an academic year at the University of Edinburgh as a British Council scholar, 1964/65. Was dramaturgist with the Dramski theater, Skopje, in two terms: 1966-1971 and 1985-1998. Participated in the International Writing Program, Iowa City, USA, 1972/73, and in the poetry festivals in Rotterdam (1978 & 1996), San Francisco (1980), Herleen (1991), Maastricht and Valencia (2000). One of the ten founders of the Independent Writers of Macedonia association and its first chairman in 1994, and since 1995 editor-in-chief of its bi-monthly journal Naše Pismo. In 1999-2003 he was acting director of the Struga Poetry Evenings International festival.

Published books:
Poetry – Mead (1962 & 1971), Alchemical Rose (1963), Libation Bearers (1966) – awarded with “Brothers Miladinov” prize for the best book of the year, Odysseus in Hell (a selection, 1969), A Well in Time (1972), Brothers Miladinov 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 Šantić 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), Poèmes choisis (2003), Survival (2004).
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, Tennesse, 1997), The Wolf at the Door (Xenos books, California, USA, 2001).
Included in all the anthologies of Macedonian and Yugoslav poetry since 1965.

Prose 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, 2002). With Ljubiša Geiorgievski Black (a tragic ferce, 1989).

Translations: 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). Translated and adapted numerous plays from English, among which: 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). Has translated and co-edited (with Louis Simpson and Serge Fauchereau) an anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, 1978, with second and renewed edition in 1999. On his poetry Lech Miodinsky wrote and published a Ph.D. dissertation: Bogomil Guzel, Poeticky dialogz natura i kultura, Katowice 1994, in Polish, translated and published in Macedonian in 1999.