Matko Abramić (Zagreb/Croatia)

A poet writing poems on the spot and offering them to passers-by or to a street band playing nearby so that it can immediately arrange it and play it to the pleasure of everyone present – that is the concept of the performance that the Croatian writer Matko Abramić has in mind for this year’s Gradić Fest, and this time he will be accompanied by Fran Nikolić on guitar and Toni Tkalec on drums. His last year’s successful program “Reci mi riječ i napisat ću ti pjesmu” (“Give me words and I will write you a poem”) has grown into a new concept called “Stvaranje spoken word banda Artefakt iz poetskog performansa”.

Abramić was born in Čakovac, in 1984, and he spent his childhood in Varaždin. He graduated from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, in the Department for Croatian Language and Literature and Bohemistics, and then he completed his apprenticeship for editor in the publishing house “Sandorf”. He writes poems and short stories, some of which have been published in literary journals and magazines “Zarez” and “Vijenac”. He has won the Rektor prize for his collection of poems “ono je samo olujne boje…”, published in 2007. He has performed with the band Voodoo Lizards from Varaždin, and in 2017 he participated in the music-poetry performance “Bicikliram, improviziram – sjajim u mraku” with the band The Mindmills from Varaždin at Dani performansa.