Luljeta Lleshanaku is a Poet Laureate of Albania (2023-2025). She belongs to the first "post-totalitarian" generation of Albanian poets. Born in 1968, she grew up under virtual house arrest because of her family's opposition to Enver Hoxha's Stalinist dictatorship. She studied Albanian Philology & Literature at the University of Tirana and later she graduated with a MFA from Warren Wilson College, USA. She was a fellow of “International Writing Program”, University of Iowa in1999 and was awarded with a fellowship as a writer from the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (2008-2009). She worked as journalist, TV author, university lecturer and researcher. 

She is the author of nine poetry collections in the Albanian language, which were critically acclaimed and awarded with national prizes such as: “PEN Albania” award, the “Tirana Book Fair” Award, KULT award, and the “Silver Pen 2000” award from the Ministry of Culture of Albania.

Her poems have been widely translated and published in collections in other languages. She won the international “Crystal Vilenica 2009” prize in Slovenia. Her last book in English Negative Space (2018) published by New Directions in USA and Bloodaxe in UK, was the winner of the "English PEN" award, a finalist for the "GRIFFIN 2019" international poetry prize in Canada and a finalist for "PEN America 2019" among other nominations. Her last book in German, Die Stadt der Äpfel (2021) was one of the books recommended by the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, in 2022. The same year, she became the laureate of the "European Poet of Freedom" award in Gdansk, Poland.