Ervina Halili

Ervina Halili (b. 1986) is a poet and literary researcher from Pristina, Kosovo. A child of the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, she wrote her first poem, “Crowd 97,” at age eleven amid political upheaval and mass protests in which students and professors called for the restoration of Albanian-language education under an increasingly repressive regime. Her third book Amuletë (Amulet, 2015)—following Vinidra (2008) and Trëndafili i heshtjes (Rose of Silence, 2004)—was awarded the Annual Literary Prize for best work of poetry in 2015. Ervina is the founder of a virtual archive/museum that features journalists’ contributions to the influential Kosovo Albanian newspaper Rilindja (1945-1991), and the preserver of material archives of this lost institution, for which she was awarded the Democracy Price by Kosovar Civil Society. She has been a writer-in-residence at several institutions across Europe, most recently at Landis&Gyr and Château de Lavigny – Switzerland, Q21/MuseumsQuartier in Vienna. Her book, Gjumi i Oktapodit (Octopus’ Slumber, 2016), was translated into German in a bilingual edition. She published “Not my eyes” in 2022 in Tirana and her most recent book is “The mountain of milk” a novel based on true events, published by Onufri in 2025.