Taciana Niadbaj is a chairperson of the Belarusian PEN, writer, human rights defender, manager of cultural and media projects.
Taciana was born in Poḷacak, studied in Minsk (2000-2006), Vilnius, and Lublin (2006-2011), worked in Warsaw (2011-2015) and Minsk (2015-2021).
After a politically motivated administrative arrest in 2006, she entered graduate school in Lublin and defended her thesis on the history of Belarusian literature. In 2015, she returned to Belarus, where she worked for an independent media project (Press Club Belarus, until 2017), Belarusian literature, culture and human rights (Belarusian PEN, since 2017) and coordinated other cultural, media, and publishing projects.
In July 2021, Taciana was forced to leave Belarus for security reasons and move the office of the Belarusian PEN from Minsk to Warsaw. The Belarusian PEN was liquidated by the Supreme Court of Belarus on August 9th, 2021, the anniversary of the presidential election, and registered in Warsaw on July 7th, 2022.
She also cooperates with the Open Culture Foundation (Lublin) as a deputy chairperson (since 2012) and the Belarusian House of Human Rights in Vilnius.
Taciana is the author of the poetry book „Sirens Sing Jazz“ (Poḷacak Labyrinths, 2014), for which she received the Maksim Bahdanovič Award “Debut” (2015) and the Golden Letter Award (2019).
Taciana translated into Belarusian Eva Thompson’s book „Imperial Knowledge. Russian Literature and Colonialism“ (2009); she is a co-author of the translations into Belarusian of the books by Leszek Kołakowski „Our Merry Apocalypse“ (2012), by Anna Burzynska and Michał Paweł Markowski „Literary Theories of the 20th Century“, and others.
In 2022, Taciana coordinated the publication of the book about Aleś Bialacki „Aleś“.
Photo by @Iryna Arakhouskaya, Reform.news
