To Hell With Poets

Winner of an English PEN Translates Award
"Baqytgul Sarmekova offers wry, darkly humorous portraits of ordinary Kazakh people held in the snare of patriarchy, cultural tradition, and postsocialist upheaval… Mirgul Kali deftly recreates the atmosphere of these everyday tensions as they quietly seethe just below the surface." ––PEN/Heim judges' citation
Vivid, hilarious and unsettling, the tragicomic characters of To Hell With Poets reflect the inner discord of the modern Kazakh. The stories move between the city and the aul, postsocialist and capitalist worlds, tradition and modernity. Incisive and unapologetic, Sarmekova refuses to hold back, offering a sharp and honest rendering of daily life in Kazakhstan.

Baqytgul Sarmekova is a Kazakh writer who grew up in a small village by the Caspian Sea. She began writing in 2014, after graduating from the Western Kazakhstani Engineering and Humanities University, where she studied law. She has since published two collections of stories: Күн батқан кездегі оқиға (An Incident in the Twilight) in 2019 and Кейіпкер (In Search of a Character) in 2020. Sarmekova is the winner of the prose award at the 2016 Shabyt International Festival of Creative Youth and a recipient of a 2020 Rahymjan Otarbaev Foundation grant, awarded bi-annually to talented young writers, poets, and playwrights.