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Dmitry Strotsev is a Belarusian poet and typically writes in Russian.
He was born in Minsk in 1963, is an architect by profession and author of 16 volumes of poetry. Strotsev is head of the literature and publishing project Novyje Mechi (New Furs), editor of the almanac and the poetry series Minskaja škola (Minsk School) and member of the Belarusian PEN Center. He has been awarded the Russkaja premija (2007), the Norwegian Authors' Union's Freedom of Speech Award (2020), the Ciampi - Valigie Rosse Prize (Italy 2020), the Grand Prix of Metajournal 2020, the Disturbing the Peace Award of the Václav Havel Library Foundation (2021) and the Tucholsky Award of the Swedish PEN Club (2021). His poems have been translated into English, Belarusian, Georgian, Italian, Lithuanian, German, Polish, Ukrainian, French, Swedish, Czech, Estonian and other languages. He lives in exile.
Since the 2000s, Dmitry Strotsev has been publishing the "Minsk School" almanac in order to pass on the work of the non-conformist Belarusian authors of the 1970s and 1980s. The main language of the almanac was initially Russian, the language of these non-conformist authors. Over time, the almanac explored multilingualism in Belarus more intensively and created links between generations and groups of authors who wrote in Russian, Belarusian, Yiddish and Polish.
The content of the almanac also focuses on the Belarusian region, as the themes of the "Minsk School" often revolve around traumatic events in Belarus, the Holocaust, resistance to Soviet power, the loss of the Yiddish and Belarusian languages, etc.
So far, four booklets have been published (2009, 2013, 2014, 2018) as well as several volumes of poetry. As part of our initiative, the fifth issue is to be published, which is dedicated to the dialog between Belarusian authors and the dialog with literary scenes in other countries. The almanac will be published in Russian.
An article by Dmitry Strotsev on the website of the TOLEDO project "Minsk. City of Translators": https://www.toledo-programm.de/cities_of_translators/5039/minsker-schule-innere-uebersetzung-und-mission