On Thursday, June 27, at 8 PM, an author’s evening with poet Tanja Bakić will be held at the House of The King’s Guard MSUCG.

Tanja Bakić, born in 1981, graduated from the Department of English at the Faculty of Philosophy in Nikšić with a thesis titled “Influences of William Blake’s Poetry on Jim Morrison’s Rock Music.” She obtained her master’s degree in literary sciences at the same faculty, defending a thesis titled “The Search for the Otherworldly in William Blake’s Poetry.” Bakić is the author of numerous works on literary science, the problematics of the otherworldly and mysticism in English poetry, and the representation of the 1960s in pop music. As an author, essayist, editor, and translator, she has published fifteen books.

In the genre of poetry, she has published five notable books, the first of which she published at the age of fifteen. She has read her poetry at major European festivals. In April 2013, she was a resident in Tirana, where a group of drama students at the Albanian Academy of Arts performed a performance inspired by her poetry. She has translated the poetry of William Blake, W.B. Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, Byron, and Andrew.

Her first poetry book was published when she was fifteen. “Intertext” (2022) is her latest poetry book. Her verses have been featured in journals such as Words Without Borders, Modern Literature, Rochford Street Review, Bosphorus Review of Books, Recours au Poème, Isla Negra, Trafika Europe, Live Encounters, Poem Hunter, and New Responsibility. Notable anthologies that have included her work are Voix de la Méditerranée (Éditions La Passe du Vent, 2012), World Haiku 2016 (Tokyo: World Haiku Association, 2016), Capitals (New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2017), and Arbolarium: Antología Poética de los Cinco Continentes (Bogotá, 2019).

Bakić has received the national scholarship for excellence from the Ministry of Science of Montenegro, the Central European Initiative Award for Literature, the British Association for Research in Modern Humanities scholarship, a residency at the International Writers’ House in Graz (Austria), a Forum of Slavic Cultures scholarship, the Cankarjev Residency in Ljubljana, and Traduki residencies in Tirana and Novo Mesto. She has also been a resident in Prague and other European cities. Twice she was selected by an international jury of art historians to represent Montenegro at the Biennale of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean (Ancona 2013 and Milan 2015). Twice she was an invited speaker at the William Blake symposium at Tate Britain in London.

Her poems “Hyacinth Girl” and “Nut Shell” were included in the anthology published as part of World Expo 2020 in Dubai and in the international anthology World Tree of Poetry, featuring leading poets from 192 countries.