The first participant of a three-week long residency (30 October – 20 November 2020) was Hanna Jankuta who is a Belarusian writer, translator from Polish and English, and a scholar in Belarusian and English literature. During her residency she studied the Polish-Belarusian borderland as the background for the story of growing up in the multiethnic crucible and of getting to know your own roots.
The second writer we hosted was Andrei Khadanovich, a poet, translator and essayist who had his work translated into fourteen languages. Khadanovich’s stay was the beginning of his translations of Adam Mickiewicz’s Ballads and Romances and selected poems by Moshe Kulbak into Belarusian.
Our third resident (14 February – 7 March 2021) was Katsiaryna Chekhatouskaya, an actress and playwright who works with the Social Theatre Lab in Minsk. In her plays, translated into Russian and German, she deals with several social problems as different kinds of abuse and discrimination. During her stay in Krasnogruda she worked on the play and theatre script whose story was about the recent changes in Belarus.
Our final residency so far (14 – 24 August 2021) was co-organized both by the Borderland Foundation and the Genshagen Foundation, Germany. The stay of two Belarusian writers in Krasnogruda was a part of the project called Talking with Belarusian Writers supported financially by the Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation. The residents were two writers. Maria Martysevich is a poet, essayist and translator . Since 2017 she has edited an avant-guard and independent book series American Woman. In 2019 she was given two awards for her book Sarmatia.
Uladzimir Lobach is a writer, anthropologist and historian. He was deprived of his job at State University in Polock for political reasons where he taught between 1994 to 2021.
The stay of Maria Martysevich and Uladzimir Lobach was financially supported by the Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation and the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.