For the very first time in its 9-year history, the 2026 European Poetry Festival will feature a night celebrating one of the continent’s most considerable poetic nations, Romania.
Romanian poets residing and writing in the UK and Ireland – Simona Nastac, Chris Tănăsescu (MARGENTO), Miruna Fulgeanu and Luminița Amarie – will join British and European spoken word artists and authors on stage, presenting brand new poetry and specially curated collaborative performances. The event is supported by the Romanian Cultural Institute.
Programme and featured poets:
Simona Nastac and Livia Franchini
Richard Ettinger and Victor Rees
Eleanor Wilders and Annabel Taylor-Munt
Katarína Krupičková and SJ Fowler
Intermission of 15 minutes
Margento and Nick Murray
Albert Pellicer and Matt Martin
Luminita Amarie and Tony White
Miruna Fulgeanu and Andra Simons
Simona Nastac is an art curator and poet, author of The Depressing Colour of Honey (Tracus Arte, 2017)
and winner of the “Alexandru Mușina” Prize for debut poetry. She writes with brevity and precision,
stripping language of rhetoric to test, at the scale of daily life, whether reality can still be lived in. Her work
has appeared in journals including Harana Poetry, Tears in the Fence, Apricity Press, and Black Bough
Poetry. In 2016, she initiated the Experimental Poetry Night within the Bucharest International Poetry
Festival, which she curated until 2019. She is also the author of Polyphonic, a poetry and moving image
project presented at major festivals and venues such as the Brussels International Poetry Fest, Haus für
Poesie Berlin, and StAnza International Poetry Festival in St Andrews.
Chris Tanasescu/ Margento is an internationally awarded intermedia poet, translator, researcher and
computer scientist currently based in Ireland. Active in both the literary and international academic
spheres, he is affiliated with the University of Galway. His work is distinguished by an interdisciplinary
approach that integrates technology, performance and artistic experimentation. Under the alias
MARGENTO, he launched a cross-artform performance poetry band 25 years ago, which has since evolved
into a transnational network of poets, artists, translators, and coders working across literature,
performance, computation, and AI. Central to this collaborative practice is #GraphPoem, an ongoing
initiative exploring poetry through computational modeling, network science, and live performance.
Tănăsescu also serves as Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova at Asymptote.
Miruna Fulgeanu is a Romanian-born poet and translator based in London. Her work has appeared in The
Poetry Review, The Yale Review, London Magazine, Poetry London and The Rialto among others. In 2023
she won the Oxford Poetry Prize, and in 2024 the Patricia Eschen Prize for Poetry. She was one of the
2024-25 Southbank New Poets, and has recently started writing her first novel thanks to an Arts Council
DYCP grant.
Luminița Amarie has published several volumes of poetry, including No Return Point (Cartier, 2025) and
Hide the Memories and Destroy Everything I Touched (Casa de Editură Max Blecher, 2019). Her
introspective lyricism reflects a sustained concern with themes such as the passage of time and nature.
Her language is balanced, at times meditative, while her poetic construction pursues a subtle
expressiveness. She has published in literary journals and taken part in events dedicated to the promotion
of contemporary poetry.
For more information please visit: https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com
Contact: europeanpoetryfestival@gmail.com
