Join us at Libreria, as we welcome a rising star from a new generation of Kazakh writers, Baqytgul Sarmekova. Sarmekova is visiting the UK to share their recently translated collection of short stories, To Hell With Poets, translated by Mirgul Kali.

“Baqytgul Sarmekova offers wry, darkly humorous portraits of
ordinary Kazakh people held in the snare of patriarchy, cultural
tradition, and postsocialist upheaval… Mirgul Kali deftly recreates
the atmosphere of these everyday tensions as they quietly seethe
just below the surface.” – PEN/Heim judges’ citation

Baqytgul Sarmekova is a Kazakh writer who grew up in a small village by the Caspian Sea. She began writing in 2014, after graduating from the Western Kazakhstani Engineering and Humanities University, where she studied law. She has since published two collections of stories: Күн батқан кездегі оқиға (An Incident in the Twilight) in 2019 and Кейіпкер (In Search of a Character) in 2020. Sarmekova is the winner of the prose award at the 2016 Shabyt International Festival of Creative Youth and a recipient of a 2020 Rahymjan Otarbaev Foundation grant, awarded bi-annually to talented young writers, poets, and playwrights.

Mirgul Kali is a Kazakh-born translator based in the US. Her translations of short fiction by Kazakh writers have been published in Tupelo Quarterly, Electric Literature, Exchanges, The Massachusetts Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. The recipient of the 2018 ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship and a 2022 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, she holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa.