I talked to the two guests of honour of the Days of Poetry and Wine 2024, Pia Tafdrup and Valzhyna Mort. They explained how fairy tales sparked their interest in reading when they were young and how they inevitably serve as early confrontations with death. Pia Tafdrup explained how the senses are used to evoke emotion. Good poetry springs not from misery, but from the tension between love and sadness, the rubbing of opposites. The artist is someone who is acutely aware of how much other people’s thoughts she wears on herself, but is still crazy/brave/patient enough to get to nakedness, the white page within. An enlightening conversation by two masterful storytellers. Pia Tafdrup is one of Denmark’s most important and widely translated poets. She grew up in rural environment in the north of the island of Zealand. She received her MA from the University of Copenhagen in 1977. She has written more than twenty works, mainly collections of poetry, but also fiction. She makes her living exclusively from writing, and since 1999 has received a lifetime grant from the Danish National Endowment for the Arts. In 1998 she was a guest at Vilenica, and in 2005 she appeared at the Trnovy Tercets. She is the recipient of several literary prizes. In 1999, she was awarded the Nordic Council Prize for Literature, Scandinavia’s most prestigious literary prize. She is a member of the Danish Academy of Literature and a Knight of the Order of Dannebrog. Valzhyna Mort is a poet and translator who has lived in the USA for almost twenty years. She has been writing and publishing in both her native language and English, in which three acclaimed collections of poetry have been published: Factory of Tears (2008), Collected Body (2011) and Music for the Dead and Resurrected (2020). The latter was named New York Times Poetry Book of the Year. She is the recipient of numerous international prizes, including the Vilenica Crystal, the Griffin Prize for Poetry and the Rilke Prize. Valzhyna Mort teaches at Cornell University in upstate New York.