This week in our poetry news round up we look at the death of the Azerbaijani People’s Poet Nariman Hasanzade and the publication of Claudia Rankine’s long-awaited new book.
People’s Poet of Azerbaijan Nariman Hasanzade Dies Aged 95
Nariman Alimammad oghlu Hasanzade, one of the leading figures of modern Azerbaijani literature, died on 1st August 2026 at the age of 95. He had been hospitalised at the end of June following a deterioration in his health.
He was born in February 1931 in the settlement of Poylu, in Azerbaijan’s Gazakh district, and the shape of his education says a good deal about the literary world he came up in. He studied language and literature at the Ganja pedagogical institute between 1949 and 1953, then spent four years at the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow. He returned to Baku for postgraduate work, completing a dissertation on Azerbaijani-Ukrainian literary relations during the war years.
Alongside the poetry he built a long career in letters and public life, editing the newspaper Literature and Art from 1976 to 1990, serving as a deputy in the Supreme Soviet, then as first deputy minister of press and information through the 1990s, and later chairing the board of the Literary Fund.
The poems came steadily from a young age. The books that made his name in the 1960s and 1970s include My Heart Desires Poetry, Unforgettable Days, You Will Remember Me, Nariman, The Emerald Bird and Aunt Nabat’s Bread, and his work has since been translated into English, French, German, Farsi, Italian, Hindi, Arabic and Russian, among others. At his farewell ceremony, speakers credited him with introducing the dramatic poem to Azerbaijani literature through Nariman and The Emerald Bird, and singled out his historical drama Atabeylar as one of the finest poetic dramas about the country’s statehood.
He was named an Honored Art Worker in 1981 and People’s Poet in 2005, and received the Shohrat, Sharaf and Istiglal orders, the Heydar Aliyev Prize in 2017 and the Heydar Aliyev Order earlier this year.
Following a ceremony at Baku’s International Mugham Center he was buried in the First Alley of Honour.
Claudia Rankine Returns with Triage
Claudia Rankine’s Triage was published by Graywolf Press on 4th August — her first book since completing the American trilogy of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Citizen and Just Us, and a considerable departure even by her standards.
Presented with full-color visuals, the book moves into sustained narrative, memory, criticism and essay. It follows the turbulent friendship of two composite characters — the narrator and the theorist, self-identified sisters trying to make sense of their wounded histories. At college the pair invent a game of collapse: every time they meet, they have to stop and fall to the ground. Over decades that word takes on new weight, in the violence of their pasts, in artworks of couches where the exhausted might rest, and in the ongoing devastation in Gaza. They first meet in a class on Hegel, drawn together by the theorist’s defense of Antigone, and the book looks back on the friendship from the present, with both women in their sixties.
Readers who came to Rankine through Citizen will recognize the method — the refusal to sit still inside one genre — even as the subject shifts inward. Citizen was a finalist for the National Book Award and won both the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and the Forward Prize. Triage runs to a compact 136 pages.
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