Miruna Vlada: A poem therapy
– Romania
Miruna Vlada is the pen-name of Miruna Troncota, a poet born in Bucharest in 1986. She chose the pseudonym when she was 16 years old and two years later, she published her first and very successful collection titled Poemextrauterine (Ectopic Poems). When she was growing up, poems were a way to escape life on a wheelchair behind hospital walls. “Poetry started at the same time as my illness,” she says. She studied political science in Bucharest, Graz, Berlin, Ljubljana, Sarajevo and Pristina and has a degree in international relations. Her dissertation thesis as well as her third poetry book deal with the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Bosnia. Partaj (Bosnia. Partition). “My method is empathy and the desire to reach out to the other one,” she notes about her work.