To Hell with Poets

Shortlisted, 2024 TA First Translation Prize

Winner, 2023 English PEN Translates Award

The first English-language collection from the rising star of a new generation of Kazakh writers.

“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.

Mirgul Kali is a Kazakh-born translator based in the US. Her translations of short fiction by Kazakh writers have been published in Tupelo Quarterly, Electric Literature, Exchanges, The Massachusetts Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the 2018 ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship and a 2022 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow.