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Jasmina Šopova and Nicolas Journet
Initiators of the Lyric Mill’s Open Portal
As soon as they caught sight of it in 2022, they knew they would make it their own and transform the Morizot Mill in Metz-le-Comte into a place dedicated to culture. The woodshed would become a poetry theater; a plot of land—rather vaguely defined at the time—would display photographs along its fences; concerts would be held on the forecourt of the veranda; the pool house would host activities for children; the garden shed would turn into the “Nightingales’ Cabin” for singing workshops aimed at the youngest… So many dreams that started becoming reality three years later.
In 2024, Jasmina Šopova and Nicolas Journet, nicknamed “the millers,” began implementing their Lyric Mill project, a title borrowed from “Lyrical House,” the multilingual website you are currently visiting. Managed by Jasmina since 2014, the website is dedicated to the Macedonian poet Aco Šopov, her father. Having indirectly inspired the project, he is regarded as “the soul of the Lyric Mill.”
Jasmina, former editor-in-chief of The UNESCO Courier, an international magazine published in several languages and addressing a worldwide audience, has organized a large number of cultural events in France as well as in North Macedonia, her country of origin. She has translated a series of poetry collections into Macedonian and French and heads the Aco Šopov Poetry Foundation, whose mission notably includes encouraging international projects among poets, translators, publishers, and other players in the cultural industries, thereby fostering international cultural cooperation.
Nicolas Journet is Section Editor for Books at Sciences Humaines (Auxerre). He has edited numerous works: Culture: From the Universal to the Particular; Morality: Ethics and the Human Sciences; Five Centuries of French Thought; The Great Thinkers of the Human Sciences; Humanism: The Destiny of a Great Idea; and, in collaboration with Jasmina Šopova, the collective volume Claude Lévi-Strauss. He is the author of The Peace of Gardens: Social Structures of the Curripaco Indians of the Upper Rio Negro (Colombia) and co-author, with Gérald Gaillard, of Anthropology – Objects – History – Currents, a reference work on the anthropological discipline.