7 May 2026

Romanian writer and poet Ana Blandiana, who will join New Europe College as a TANDEM, Author with Translator – Translator with Author Fellow in 2026/2027, has been granted the 2026 Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, one of Poland’s most prestigious literary distinctions. The prize, awarded annually by the Zbigniew Herbert Foundation to a living author for their entire body of work, will be presented on 27 May 2026, at the National Library of Poland in Warsaw.

The award marks the second major recognition of Blandiana’s poetry in Poland, following the 2016 European Poet of Freedom Award, granted by the city of Gdańsk for her poetry volume, My Homeland A4.

Reacting to the announcement, Blandiana described the distinction as especially emotional because it bears the name of a poet she feels connected to “through destiny.”

“This is neither the first distinction I have received, nor the first awarded to me in Poland, yet it is the first that bears the name and preserves the memory of a poet to whom I feel profoundly connected,” she said. “Separated by more than a generation, Zbigniew Herbert ascended the Golgotha of resistance to censorship before me, perhaps along a harsher and steeper path. And yet, the inner mechanisms of poetic resistance were the same, as were the forms of repression that, in the end, failed to defeat us.”

The Herbert Prize, accompanied by the statuette Herbert’s Signature, has been awarded since 2013 to writers whose artistic and intellectual achievements resonate with the values embodied in the work of Polish poet and essayist Zbigniew Herbert. Herbert was widely regarded as a moral voice for Poland’s Solidarity generation because of both his literary work and his outspoken opposition to the communist regime.

New Bilingual Poetry Volume to Appear in Poland

Alongside the award, the Herbert Foundation is supporting the publication of a new bilingual Polish-Romanian edition of Blandiana’s poetry, titled Se face liniște în mine [Silence Settles Within Me]. The volume will include 56 selected poems drawn from her recent Romanian collections Se face liniște în mine (Humanitas, 2024) and Variațiuni pe o temă dată (Humanitas, 2018).

This will be the third volume of Blandiana’s poetry translated into Polish. Her works have previously appeared in Polish translation in Pięta achillesowa i inne wiersze (1982) and Moja ojczyzna A4 (2016), the latter earning both Blandiana and translator Joanna Kornaś-Warwas the European Poet of Freedom Award.

 

_________
Photo: Ana Blandiana (source: humanitas.ro)