Richard Berengarten (previously known as Richard Burns) was born in London in 1943 into a family of musicians. In 1975, he founded the renowned international Cambridge Poetry Festival. For the first time since the early 1980s, he returns this year to the Struga Poetry Evenings, where the second book in his Balkan Trilogy, a lyrical and dramatic poem-cycle based on Balkan rainmaking customs (Во време на суша, tr. Lidija Nikolova, ed. Katica Kulavkova, Skopje, Diversity, 2013), is being presented in the Poetry and Ritual programme. Richard Berengarten’s has published more than twenty books, including Black Light: Poems in Memory of George Seferis; The Manager; Book With No Back Cover; For the Living (Selected Longer Poems 1965-2000); The Blue Butterfly; Under Balkan Light; and, most recently, translations from Katica Kulavkova (Naked Eye: Голо око, Skopje, Diversity, 2012), and Tin Ujević.

Full Biography

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Richard Berengarten (previously known as Richard Burns) was born in London in 1943 into a family of musicians. In 1975, he founded the renowned international Cambridge Poetry Festival. For the first time since the early 1980s, he returns this year to the Struga Poetry Evenings, where the second book in his Balkan Trilogy, a lyrical and dramatic poem-cycle based on Balkan rainmaking customs (Во време на суша, tr. Lidija Nikolova, ed. Katica Kulavkova, Skopje, Diversity, 2013), is being presented in the Poetry and Ritual programme. Richard Berengarten’s has published more than twenty books, including Black Light: Poems in Memory of George Seferis; The Manager; Book With No Back Cover; For the Living (Selected Longer Poems 1965-2000); The Blue Butterfly; Under Balkan Light; and, most recently, translations from Katica Kulavkova (Naked Eye: Голо око, Skopje, Diversity, 2012), and Tin Ujević.

He is the recipient of many prizes, including the Eric Gregory Award, the Keats Memorial Prize, the Duncan Lawrie Prize, the Yeats Club Prize, the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Award for Poetry, the international Morava Charter Prize (Serbia), and the Manada Prize (Macedonia). His book The Blue Butterfly provided the Veliki školski čas memorial-oratorio for Nazi massacre-victims in Kragujevac, Serbia (2007), and he is an honorary citizen of Kragujevac. As a poet, Richard Berengarten is a dedicated internationalist. His ‘Volta Project’ involves translations of one of his poems into more than 90 languages. He lives with his wife Dr. Melanie Rein, a Jungian analyst, in Cambridge, where he teaches at Cambridge University.

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