Ilja Kostovski was born in 1933. He was a Macedonian refugee from the Greek Civil War. As an illiterate 14 year old child he fled northern Greece to Czechoslovakia where at the age of 27 he received a PhD in Russian literature at Charles University in Prague. Throughout his tenure he taught at universities in Prague, Potsdam, Heidelberg. He received invitations to teach at the University of Maryland and the College of William and Mary. He was one of the visiting poets of the 1977 International Poetry Festival in San Francisco where he he formed a life long friendship with San Francisco's Poet Laureate Jack Hirschman and City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlingetti. He died in Washington DC in 2017.
