Diana Anphimiadi (Georgia) and Lyuba Yakimchuk (Ukraine) are the Versopolis Poets at Poetry International Festival

May 27, 2025

As part of the Versopolis network, the 55th Poetry International Festival Rotterdam — that took place from June 12 to 15 at LantarenVenster — featured Georgian poet Diana Anphimiadi and Ukrainian poet Lyuba Yakimchuk. Both poets participated in the opening program of the Poetry International Festival on June 12 at Theater Zuidplein in Rotterdam, as well as on other festival days where they each delivered a keynote reading and appeared in various programs at the festival's main venue, LantarenVenster in Rotterdam.

Versopolis

Versopolis is an ambitious European poetry project that has, since 2015, brought together over forty countries and poetry partners. The aim of Versopolis is to foster European exchange of promising poetic talent and to develop a digital platform where a broad audience can get to know poets and poetry festivals from across Europe. The project now promotes nearly 380 emerging European poets and their poetry under the motto "where poetry lives." Currently, ten poets — Maria Barnas, Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, Radna Fabias, Maarten van der Graaff, Asha Karami, Nyk de Vries, Babs Gons, Nisrine Mbarki, Maxime Garcia Diaz, and Babeth Fotchind — are part of the Dutch Versopolis pool. In the near future, Poetry International will nominate new poets to be introduced to the network and to international stages. Versopolis is made possible with financial support from the European Union.

Diana Anphimiadi

Diana Anphimiadi is a Georgian poet, linguist, teacher, writer, and journalist. After graduating with a master's degree in general linguistics from Ivane Javakhishvili State University, she is now pursuing a PhD at the same university. She has published four poetry collections. Her debut Chocolate (2008) won the Tsero Prize in 2008 and the Saba Prize for Best Debut of the Year in 2009. That same year, she also received the Nikoloz Batarashvili Prize. Her poetry has been published in English in Beginning to Speak (2018) and Why I No Longer Write Poems (2022), with the original Georgian texts alongside English translations by Natalia Bukia-Peters and poet Jean Sprackland. Why I No Longer Write Poems was awarded the PEN Translates Award. According to her translator Natalia Bukia-Peters, Anphimiadi's poetry gives abstract thought a body and a heartbeat, offering a glimpse of the eternal in the everyday, as her publisher describes it. She also revitalizes classical ancient myths using contemporary tools, thus expanding the understanding of poetic form.

In addition to her research and poetry, Anphimiadi has written two cookbooks and several children's books. In 2018, she was honored with the Iakob Gogebashvili Award for children's and youth literature for Fairytales Written in a Sketchbook (2018). She is actively involved in pedagogical education and has published articles on pedagogy and inclusive education. Alongside her work in comparative and corpus linguistics, she also researches Georgian gastronomy, culinary linguistics, and culinary and ethnocultural practices. Her work has been translated into various languages, including German, Russian, Greek, Czech, Latvian, and Armenian. Anphimiadi’s poems have been featured in several anthologies, including Je suis nombreuses (2021), a French anthology of Georgian poetry by women poets.

Lyuba Yakimchuk

Lyuba Yakimchuk is a Ukrainian poet, playwright, screenwriter, and performance artist. She grew up in Pervomaisk, Luhansk, in eastern Ukraine. In 2011, she graduated from the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy with a master’s degree in literary theory, history, and comparative literature. Academic Polina Barskova describes Yakimchuk as one of the boldest voices in contemporary Ukrainian poetry. She has also been named one of the 100 most influential people in Ukrainian arts by The New Voice of Ukraine.

Yakimchuk has published two poetry collections: Like FASHION (2009) and Apricots of Donbas (2015). The latter was written during the early years of the war in Ukraine and won the International Poetic Award from the Kovalev Foundation in New York. In this collection, Yakimchuk experiments with language and sound, reflecting the voice of war. According to her, language is only as beautiful or broken as the world around it — a world where political and social events shape how people use language. The French translation of Apricots of Donbas (Les Abricots du Donbas, 2023) was nominated for the Prix Mallarmé and released as an audiobook narrated by French actress Catherine Deneuve.

Yakimchuk has received various awards for her poetry, including the Smoloskyp Prize (2008) and the International Slavic Poetic Award (2013). At the 2022 Grammy Awards, she performed her poem Prayer in tribute to Ukraine as part of John Legend's performance of his song Free. Her poetry has been translated into over twenty-five languages, including English, Hebrew, Estonian, Swedish, and Japanese, and has appeared in international media such as The New York Times and the BBC. She is also recognized for her work as a screenwriter and has participated in musical and poetic projects throughout Europe.