Tatsiana Niadbai

PEN Belarus president, writer, human rights defender, and manager of cultural and media projects. In December 2022, she published Ales Bialiacki's book, Ales.

Born in Polack, studied in Minsk (2000-2006), Vilnius, and Lublin (2006-2011), and worked in Warsaw (2011-2015) and Minsk (2015-2021). In 2015 she returned to Belarus, where she worked for independent media (Press Club Belarus, till 2017), for Belarusian literature, culture, and human rights (Belarusian PEN, since 2017) and coordinated other cultural, media, and publishing projects. In July 2021, she was forced to leave Belarus for security reasons and moved PEN Belarus' office to Warsaw. PEN Belarus was banned in Belarus by a Supreme Court decision on August 9, 2021, the anniversary of the presidential election, and registered in Warsaw in 2022.

Also cooperates with Open Culture Foundation (Lublin) as co-founder and vice-president (since 2012), with Belarusian Human Rights House in Vilnius as a stakeholder of the Establishment (since 2017) and Chairman (since 2021), and with independent Belarusian media SNplus.

Author of the poetry book Sirens Singing Jazz (Сірэны спяваюць джаз, Połackija Łabitynty, 2014), for which she received the Maksim Bahdanovič Debut Award. Translator into Belarusian of Ewa Thompson's "Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism" (2009), co-author of translations into Belarusian of Leszek Kołakowski's "Our Merry Apocalypse" (2012), Anna Burzyńska and Michal Paweł Markowski's "Twentieth-century literary theories", etc.