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"A story that draws you in immediately. Skilfully presented images, both impressive and meditative. Precisely depicted mysterious and unpredictable characters. Realistic, but disturbing setting. Carefully selected exteriors and interiors - someone else's apartment, for example, as a kind of "immovable character", into which the main character secretly enters as in a cradle and a tomb, which lures to radical decisions. The novel "Someone Was Here" is psychologically compelling and disturbingly profound: it hunts the moment when the pain becomes madness and death."

Nikola Gelevski

Nikolina Andova Shopova 

Nikolina Andova Shopova writes with a rare fidelity to what stays half-said: the pressure inside silence, the charge carried by ordinary objects, the way absence can leave evidence more durable than presence. A poet and prose writer from Skopje, she moves toward the dark, unspoken, and intimate without mistaking them for ornament. Her work often turns on loneliness, alienation, fear, and the difficult possibility of reconnecting, while refusing easy consolation; even the smallest domestic detail can become a vessel for memory, desire, grief, or obsession. 

She first came to prominence as a poet with The Entrance Is on the Other Side (2013), which received the Struga Poetry Bridge Award for Best Debut Poetry Book, followed by Connect the Dots (2014). In 2016, Éditions Bruno Doucey published a selection of her poetry in English, Macedonian, and French. Her work has also appeared in Serbian and Slovak, and her poems have been included in numerous Macedonian and European anthologies and presented in translation at poetry festivals across Europe.

That same alertness to what trembles beneath the visible runs through her prose. Her debut novel, Некој бил тука (Someone Was Here, 2018), which won the Novel of the Year award in Macedonia, extends her interest in the unstable border between the ordinary and the symbolic, and in how private dread, bodily life, and moral uncertainty shape perception. The novel was later translated into Serbian and published by Treći Trg, and is now available in English from Fidessa Literary as Someone Was Here.