Volha Hapeyeva was born in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, in 1982 and, in a country where the language you choose to use is a highly charged political act, writes in Belrussian not Russian. In My Garden of Mutants translated by Annie Rutherford, programme co-ordinator of StAnza, the poetry festival held each year at St Andrews, deals with the personal as well as the political, with love as well as death:

These subtle, nuanced poems offer a chance to hear, unmediated, an authentic voice from a nation about which little is known, but which has been in the news this year: