In the summer of 2020, the prestigious publishing house Peter Lang published my English translation of the revised monograph on the Slovene painter Tone Kralj written by the Slovene historian Egon Pelikan, PhD. Hitler and Mussolini in Churches. The Church Painter’s Subversion of Fascism: The Ideological Marking of Space along the Slovene–Italian Border presents a unique phenomenon in the world history: the antifascist engagement of the Slovene painter Tone Kralj, who before, during and after the Second World War painted more than fifty churches along the former Rapallo Border. More information about his incredible courage and creativity can be read here.

According to the decision of the jury of the Slovenian Association of Literary Translators, my translation of John Williams's novel Augustus will receive the Sovre Award, the Slovene award for best literary translation for 2019. The award will also be given to Tatjana Jamnik's translation of Jan Nemec's novel A History of Light. 

The jury for the Sovre Award was composed of eminent Slovene translators and book connossieurs: Nada Grošelj (president), Aleš Berger, Lijana Dejak, Matej Hriberšek and Majda Kne.

The presentation of the award will take place on Thursday, 24 October 2019, at 7 pm at Anton Sovre Library in Hrastnik (the Slovene town in which Anton Sovre, an accomplished Slovene translator who lent the award his name, was born). 

The list of other Sovre laureates is published on the website of the Slovenian Association of Literary Translators. 

My Slovene translation of John Williams's novel Augustus has been shortlisted for the 2019 Sovre Award, the Slovene award for best literary translation. The award is bestowed annualy by the Slovenian Association of Literary Translators.

The short list includes two other translators: Marjanca Mihelič and Tatjana Jamnik. 

In 2014, the Slovene publishing house Modrijanova založba published my Slovene translation of Keith Lowe's historical bestseller Savage Continent (Podivjana celina).
In 2017, the author published a new historical monograph entitled The Fear and the Freedom (Strah in svoboda), which deals with how WWII changed the whole world. The book will be published in Slovene in the autumn of 2018 by the same Slovene publishing house.

On a cold December afternoon in beautiful Prague a young man, Jaroslav Brtek, approached me and asked me if I were willing to participate in his student project "Humans of Prague". I guess it was the openness to the uknown that travelling brings that made me blurt out "Yes". The photos and the stories of people photographed are published on his website -- do have a look because they are a touching portrait of not only a bunch of strangers in Prague, but also life itself. Had I been stopped a few days later when our Jungian conference had already been over, my answer would have been slightly longer and different and would have also involved Jung's shadowy aspects ...
Interestingly, Jaroslav approached me while I was using my smart phone in order to locate myself on the physical map. I still love the maps, the "real" ones that you can hold in your hands. Just a day later, my phone ended on a roof below the Prague Castle (a beautiful final resting place, if you ask me), which made me aware how many things smart phones had replaced (alarm clocks, watches, calendars, notebooks, cameras ...) ... as if the digital/virtual has been winning the battle with the analogue/physical. On the one hand, such a change made our lives much more practical (just think how many things you don't need to take with you when you go travelling), on the other, it robbed us of the physicality of things, memories, relations ...
So I really love that the photo shows me with a map in my hands and as an inhabitant of Prague, a city that has been dear to me since my first visit in 1993.

The beginning of September will see the 32nd edition of the Vilenica International Literary Festival, one of the most important literary festivals in Slovenia and central Europe. A number of events in different languages (Slovene, English and participants' mother tongues) will take place from Tuesday, September 5, to Saturday, September 9, all over Slovenia. You are cordially invited to join us -- the programme is published here. 

In December 2016, I was admitted into the IAAP Router Programme and became a trainee of Jungian analysis, which allows me to work with clients under the supervision of a Jungian analyst. I would like to focus my work on dream interpretation, with which I got acquainted in the monthly workshop delivered by the Serbian psychotherapists Marija and Ivan Nastović, which I attended for six years. Given my fluency in English, I can also hold session in English. If you are interested in the meaning of your dreams and Jungian analysis, feel free to contact me and we can arrange a meeting either at the Slovene Littoral or in Ljubljana. 

The Slovene publishing house Modrijan has just published my translations of Oliver Sacks's autobiography On the Move. A Life and his collection of essays Gratitude.

With the Slovene translation of John Williams novel Stoner having been a huge success (the novel was re-published in paperback and electronic version, and reprinted), the Mladinska knjiga publishing house has decided to publish Williams's last novel Augustus, the 1972 winner of the National Book Award and an amazing novel about the life of the first Roman emperor.

Having translated Oliver Sacks's autobiography On the Move. A Life, which will be published by the Modrijan publishing house, I embarked on a new translation project: a monograph by the Slovene historian Egon Pelikan dealing with the Slovene artist Tone Kralj and his church paintings in the Primorska region, which was annexed by Italy in the aftermath of WWI. Financed by the secret organization of Slovene and Croatian Catholic priests, Tone Kralj, an expressionist painter par excellence, painted the Slovene ethnic boundary by redecorating churches standing along the then Rapallo border. Fusing Catholicism with the national idea, he created unique ideological marking of space that bears no comparison in the European area.  

The Slovene original Tone Kralj in prostor meje will be published by the Cankarjeva založba publishing house.

The Slovene Writers' Association, the organizer of the Vilenica International Literary Festival, has just published Dzeja, the Anthology of Contemporary Latvian Poetry. The poets and their poems were selected by Klemen Pisk and Artis Ostups, with the majority of texts being translated from English.

The anthology also includes my translations of five poems by Inese Zandere. I would like to thank her English translator Ieva Lesinska-Geibere for helping me better understand her English translations and the rich cultural and folk tradition encoded in them. 

This flattering words start the presentation of the Slovene translation of John William's novel Stoner published in the last issue of Bukla, the Slovene magazine for books that just a few days ago received a special prize by the Slovene Book Fair.

Stoner was published in the beginning of November by the Mladinska knjiga publishing house in its most prestigious literary collection "Kondor" (Condor), which will celebrate its 60th anniversary in 2016.

In September, Sodobnost, one of the most prominent Slovene journals for literature and culture, published my essay on Keith Lowe's Savage Continent. The essay addresses the process of its translation into Slovene and sheds light on all the interesting stories that the book gave birth to.  

The beginning of September (1 Sept. - 5. Sept.) will see the 30th edition of the Vilenica International Literary Festival, the major literary festival in Slovenia. All events will be bilingual, with the majority of them being held in the Slovenian and English languages, and will be open to the general public. The program can be found on the festival website. 

The Slovenian translation of Keith Lowe's monograph Savage Continent/Podivjana celina, one of my recent projects, tops the May's bestseller list in Slovenia. 

In 2014, the internationally acclaimed academic publisher Palgrave Macmillan published the monograph Religion and Politics in Post-Socialist Central and Southeastern Europe edited by Sabrina P. Ramet. The book includes the article The Catholic Church and Politics in Slovenia by the Slovenian historian Dr Egon Pelikan, which I have translated into English. 

The last week of January 2015 saw the shooting of potential material for a BBC documentary on Boris Pahor (aged 101), a concentration camp survivor, a Slovene writer and candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Four days of shooting resulted in an 8-hour-long interview, 8 hours of interpreting and a transcribed text with a length of 113 pages. Headed by the BBC-related scriptwriter and director Marc Ramsay, the Slovene team consisted of the journalist Neva Zajc, director Tomaž Burlin, cameramen Niko and Črt Čadež, interpreter Breda Biščak and two typists Kaja Sašek and Vesna Kos.  

If produced, the BBC documentary will be based on the interview with Pahor and his novel Necropolis, in which he describes how he survived Natzweiler-Struthof, Dachau and some other German concentration camps. 

The Modrijan publishing house has just published the Slovenian translation of the excellent historical monograph Savage Continent. Europe in the Aftermath of WWII by Keith Lowe. The author will visit the Slovenian capital in March 2015. 

For a brief presentation of the book by the author himself please visit the folllowing page. 

Stoner – a beautiful novel about love in its many forms (love of a woman, literature, one’s job) – was written by John E. Williams in 1965. When published, it was relatively well accepted, yet its real success came almost half a century later when it was translated into French.

Its Slovene translation will be published next year by the Mladinska knjiga publishing house. 

To celebrate the eightieth anniversary of the birth of the Irish writer John McGahern (12 November 1934), we would like to cordially invite you to a discussion with Tina Mahkota, a connoisseur of Irish literature, Maja Novak, the Slovene translator of McGahern’s novels, and Aidan O`Malley,a visiting professor of Irish Studies at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb. The discussion on McGahern’s life, work and contemporary Irish literature will be hosted by Breda Biščak and held in the Slovene language.

A taste of real Ireland will also be provided by the musicians Gašper Kvartič and Luka Jerman. The event will be held at the Modrijan Bookshop on Friday, 14 November, at 6 pm.

In the first week of September, the Slovene region of Kras and several Slovene towns will host Vilenica, the traditional international literary festival. All events will be held in several languages, including English, and are open to the general public. You are cordially invited to join us. 

Having just finished the translation of Keith Lowe's monumental monograph Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of WWII – a must for any lover of history, I am looking forward to my new “literary adventure”, so to speak. August will be spent in the company of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller as I am to embark on the translation of Nin's first book House of Incest.

“All that I know is contained in this book, written without witness, an edifice without dimension, a city hanging in the sky,” wrote the author in the early 1930s.

“Anais Nin, in fact, persistently called this slim volume an attempt to come to grips, artistically, with her own personal 'season in hell'. It was ‘corrosive’ fiction, she thought, a poetic, lyrical transformation of experiences she had initially captured in all their emotional shadings in the still secret pages of her lifelong diary.”   That is how Gunther Stuhlmann commented Nin’s “dream book” in his foreword to the book itself.

According to Stuhlmann, “it was Stuart Gilbert, the friend and translator of James Joyce into French, who provided in a few lines – in a preface never used – perhaps the most illuminating and still valid key to Anaïs Nin’s lyrical outburst:”

“The title of the book, The House of Incest, designates the exploration of an unknown world. According to her, in the world of passion each lover creates the being he loves, the loved one is a creation or a projection of the lover, a phantom born of his imagination; he loves something that is part of himself, he identifies with the loved ones, and therefore this love of an unreal image is an act on incest. To my mind nothing like this has ever been written. To see love, one must be situated first at the core of life itself, within ecstasy itself; one must be a poet.”

The Slovene translation will be published this autumn by the Modrijan publishing house. 

By the end of 2014, the Modrijan Publishing House will have published the Slovene translation of Keith Lowe's Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II.

“Based on original documents, interviews and scholarly literature in eight languages, Savage Continent is a window on the brief, chaotic period between the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War.  It is the first major history of the aftermath of the war in any language.” (Quote from the author’s website)