Miha Mazzini

Miha Mazzini (1961) is a writer with more than 30 published books. One of his short stories won the US Pushcart Prize in 2012. He is also an award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker (his last feature film won Best Screenplay Award at the Raindance Film Festival and was picked up by HBO). He also holds a PhD in anthropology. His books about his childhood are popular and critically acclaimed, including Kralj ropotajočih duhov (The King of the Rattling Spirits) (Študentska založba, 2001). The film adaptation of the book, Sweet Dreams, won the Golden Palm for Best Film at the Mostra de Valencia. In addition, his book Otroštvo (Childhood) (Goga, 2015) has been translated into three languages and won the national Kresnik Award for best novel. His latest book is Osebno (It’s Personal) (Goga, 2022). Some of his other novels and films focus on people who find themselves without rights and in the clutches of bureaucracy. He has given voice to those who are silenced, as in his book and feature film Izbrisana (Erased), which looks at the issue of the nearly 2 % of the population of Slovenia who were, in the bureaucratic and political aftermath of the breakup of Yugoslavia, erased from state records in 1992, rendering them stateless.

Milan Dekleva

Milan Dekleva (1946), poet, writer, playwright, essayist and translator, was born in Ljubljana to Triestine Slovene parents. He is also a musician and was a member of the 1970's group Salamander, with which he has recently been performing again. He studied comparative literature and literary theory at the University of Ljubljana, then worked as a music pedagogue, journalist and editor. He is a full member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He is the author of twenty-seven poetry collections, eight novels, three books of short stories, and three essay collections. As a poet he looks to the early phases of European thought and Eastern philosophies and in doing so uses paradoxes and practices from musical improvisation. Through his poetry he reveals a holistic view of the world, the universe, nature and man. In his narrative fiction he talks mostly about the lives of individuals that find themselves at personal, social and historic turning points. He also writes librettos for operas, lyrics for cantatas, theatre, puppet and radio plays, songs, tales and musicals for children, and translates from English, Italian, Croatian and Serbian. He has received numerous awards, among others the Prešeren Lifetime Achievement Award.

Miljana Cunta

Miljana Cunta (1976) is a poet, editor and translator, author of four volumes of poetry – Za pol neba (For Half the Sky) (Beletrina, 2010), Pesmi dneva (Songs of the Day) (KUD Logos, 2014), Svetloba od zunaj (Light from Outside) (Mladinska knjiga, 2018), Nekajkrat smo zašli, zdaj se vračamo (We Lost Our Way a Few Times, Now We Are Returning) (Slovenska matica, 2023). She has written a number of accompanying texts and reflections on poetry and was a guest columnist for Delo, Slovenia’s major daily newspaper. She was programme director of the international literary festivals Vilenica and Fabula. Her poems have been nominated for the most important Slovene poetry awards. The poet Brane Senegačnik wrote of Cunta’s poetic landscapes: “This poetry is these landscapes: individual images, thoughts and motifs seem to be merely elements from which they emerge. Be it Greek islands, Roman squares, a landscape with birch trees, or the bedroom, they are always part of the same world, which extends outwards and inwards. There is something muted, unsettling and at the same time pure in the air; because it is open, this world is real.”

Mladen Dolar

Mladen Dolar (1951) is a professor and scientific advisor at the University of Ljubljana. His main fields of interest include German classical philosophy, psychoanalysis, contemporary French philosophy and art theory. He furthered his studies in Paris and London, worked for a year as a researcher at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen, was for three years advisor-mentor at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, has been a guest professor at the University of Chicago since 2013 and the European Graduate School in Switzerland since 2015. In addition to this he has lectured at numerous universities in the US and Europe and is author of over one hundred and fifty articles published in scientific journals and magazines. He has published twenty books in Slovene, from Strukture fašističnega gospostva (The Structures of Fascist Economy) (DDU Univerzum, 1982) to Od kod prihaja oblast? (Where Does Authority Come From) (Društvo za teoretsko psihoanalizo, 2021). Worth noting among his publications abroad are especially A Voice and Nothing More (MIT 2006, translated into twelve languages) and Opera’s Second Death (with Slavoj Žižek, Routledge 2001). He is the co-founder of what became known in the world as the “Ljubljana Lacanian School.”

Mojca Kumerdej

Mojca Kumerdej (1964), writer, philosopher and critic, was born in Ljubljana where she studied philosophy. Her literature is set in various social contexts and time periods, but the main themes revolve around the relationship between the individual and the collective, caught in the dialectics of desire and pleasure, and various forms of violence at an individual and systemic level that are conveyed with a critical sharpness and in places with irony. She has received numerous awards for her work, among them the Prešeren Fund Award and the Kritiško Sito Award for her novel Kronosova žetev (The Harvest of Chronos) (Beletrina, 2016), the Cankar Award for her collection of short stories Gluha soba (The Anechoic Chamber) (Goga, 2022), the Kočićevo Pero Award for the Serbian edition of her collection Temna snov (Dark Matter, Tamna materija, Geopoetika, 2015) and the Crystal Vilenica Award for her story Pod gladino (Under the Surface). Her work is included in numerous Slovene and foreign anthologies. Among other translations, Wallstein Verlag has published the German translations of Kronosova žetev and an anthology of her short prose. As a freelance writer and publicist, she writes about art, science and culture, and has collaborated as a dramaturge in theatre and dance performances.

Mojca Širok

Mojca Širok (1968) is a journalist and author. Since 1993 she has covered Italian politics and society, first for political weekly Mladina and later as a reporter for Slovenia’s broadcaster RTV Slovenia. She was also RTV Slovenia’s foreign correspondent from Italy and the Vatican. During this time she wrote documentaries about the Italian mafia and Italian politics. In 2010 Širok published Zadnji rimski cesar (The Last Roman Emperor) (Finance), about the collapse of the Italian party system in the early 1990s and the subsequent rise of Silvio Berlusconi, and Oblast brez obraza (Power without a Face) (Mladinska knjiga), about Italy’s four traditional mafia organisations. In 2014 she published Od Benedikta do Frančiška (From Benedict to Francis) (Mladinska knjiga). The book investigates the story behind the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI and the election of Pope Francis. She published two crime novels, Pogodba (The Deal) (Mladinska knjiga, 2018) and Evidenca (The List) (Mladinska knjiga, 2021), with the third forthcoming in September 2023. She currently works as RTV Slovenija's EU correspondent in Brussels.

Nataša Kramberger

Nataša Kramberger (1983) is a writer, columnist, and eco-farmer. She regularly writes essays and commentaries for newspapers and magazines. Her debut novel Nebesa v robidah, roman v zgodbah (Blackberry Heaven) (JKSD, 2007) won the 2010 European Union Prize for Literature (EUPL). In her texts she links the rural and the urban, fuses genres that flow from the poetic and fairy-tale to the literary- documentary and journalistic. She is the author of, among others, Kaki vojaki (Khaki Soldiers) (Litera, 2011), Brez zidu (Without a Wall) (Cankarjeva založba, 2014), Primerljivi hektarji (Comparable Hectares) (LUD Literatura, 2018) and Po vsej sili živ (Stonecrop) (Goga, 2023). She is also (co-) author of a number of projects about natural construction with earth, conservation and ecology. In the warmer months she lives in Jurovski Dol, where she runs a small biodynamic farm. With the eco-artistic collective Zelena Centrala she hosts young people from all over Europe, bringing them into contact with the land and trying to equip them for combating climate change. In the winter she lives in Berlin where she is trying to figure out how this kind of engagement with the issue of climate change can also be conducted in the concrete surroundings of a vast city with over three and a half million residents.

Nina Mav Hrovat

Nina Mav Hrovat (1975) studied at the Faculty of Education at the University of Ljubljana and completed her MA in pre- school education. She initially worked as a teacher and is now employed as a pre-school teacher in a kindergarten. She publishes professional articles and gives lectures for parents and professionals, performs for children in nursery schools and primary schools in Slovenia and abroad, encouraging reading culture. Her first stories were published in 2001 in quality children’s magazines (Cicido, Ciciban). Her debut book, the fairy tale O kralju, ki ni maral pospravljati (The King Who Hated Tidying Up) (Mladinska knjiga, 2008) received the 2009 award for Best Slovene Original Picturebook. In recent years she has received numerous other nominations and awards for her picture books, many for the 2021 group project of audio stories she worked on, Logopedske lahkonočnice (Speech Therapy Goodnight Tales), that received the Special Jake Wittmer Research Award, for an excellent solution to a problem that is identified on the basis of an exceptional research of a situation/market, as well as the Golden Textwriting Award. Also notable are two of her recent works, Posluh, jazbec gre! (Listen Up, Here Comes Badger!) (Miš, 2020) and Ozimnica (Stores for the winter) (Zala, 2020).

Nina Medved

Nina Medved (1989) was named the most promising young author at the Slovene literary festival of young authors Urška (2019). Subsequentially, the Republic of Slovenia Public Fund for Cultural Activities (JSKD) published her debut poetry book Drseči svet (Sliding World) in 2020, which was nominated the best debut book at the 2021 Slovenian Book Fair. A year later, an audiobook with the artist’s interpretations of poems from the book was released. Her poetry was also published in major Slovenian literary magazines as well as in other languages (English, German, French, Greek, Czech and Macedonian).

She is the co-creator of many literary activities in Slovenia and France and mainly translates from French. She is also a mentor to young literary voices. She founded Dve luni (Two Moons), The Centre for the Poetisation of the World. In 2021 she was awarded the international Pont Prize for promising literary authors for the “existential depth and Renaissance span” of her work. Her second book is about to be published by Cankarjeva založba, and the German translation of Drseči svet (Gleitende Welt) by Drava Verlag (2023).

Noah Charney

Noah Charney (1979) is an international best-selling author of over twenty books, translated into fourteen languages, including The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art (W. W. Norton & Company, 2017) which was nominated for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and Museum of Lost Art (Phaidon, 2018), which was the finalist for the 2018 Digital Book World Award. He is a professor of art history and specialises in art crime. He completed his PhD at the University of Ljubljana and has taught there, as well as at Yale and other universities. His articles have been published in many major magazines and newspapers, including The Guardian and The Washington Post. Recently he has fronted an influencer campaign for Samsung, and in 2022 he presented the BBC Radio 4 documentary, China’s Stolen Treasures. He lives in Slovenia with his wife, children and their hairless dog. He is the author of five books on Slovenia and presents what he calls “the world’s best country” in videos, podcasts, and articles. His Slovenology: Living and Traveling in the World’s Best Country (Beletrina, 2017) was a bestseller, and he hosts the official English language podcast for the Slovenian Tourist Board, Feel Slovenia.