«In my journey as a man and as a writer, I have always come across the suffering of borders. The first invisible border is language, and this is why I write, to break down the borders.» A poet, novelist and journalist, born in Lushnjë, in Albania, in 1967, Gazmend Kapllani graduated in arts at the University of Athens, and he took his doctoral dissertation at the Pantio University in the Greek capital, where he taught the history and culture of modern Albania. He was a columnist for the Athens newspaper Ta Nea and in 2012, a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard. He currently lives between Europe and the United States, where he teaches European Literature and History. In his poetry, he dissects the way the collapse of totalitarian regimes and transnational migration have shaped and continue to shape the personal stories of much of humanity. Himself a migrant, after the fall of the Albanian communist regime in 1991, he walked to Greece. His experience of that time is recounted clearly, with all its expectations, frustrations and everyday situations somewhere between farce and disaster, in the beautiful A Short Border Handbook, a book written with «a light hand and a heavy heart» (Internazionale).

(photo: © Giliola Chistè)