Andrej Blatnik was born on May 22nd, 1963,
in Ljubljana, Slovenija, where he studied
Comparative Literature and Sociology of
Culture and got his MA in American
Literature and PhD in Communication Studies.
He was a freelance
writer for five years. He works as
an editor in Cankarjeva publishing house,
teaches publishing studies at the University of Ljubljana and was the president of
the jury for the
Vilenica prize between 2007 and 2015.
The list of his 18 books in Slovenian as well as roughly 40 books in translation is available here.
He is included in many anthologies including Best European Fiction 2010, edited by Aleksander Hemon, with the preface by Zadie Smith, and Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short Short Stories (Persea Books 2014).
A short movie was made after one of his
stories and another one was adapted into a
TV drama. He wrote many radio dramas and translated several books from
English, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and The
Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles among them.
He won some major Slovenian
literary awards (the award of the city of
Ljubljana, Zlata ptica, the highest
award for young artists, and "Prešernov
sklad" award among them). Russian translation of his book You Do Understand won the 2016 Jugra Award for the best Slavic book of short stories translated into Russian.
His stories have been published in English, German,
Spanish, Portuguese, Finnish, Swedish, French, Italian, Hungarian,
Rumanian, Bulgarian, Greek, Polish,
Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovakian, Lithuanian,
Macedonian, Croatian, Serbian, Albanian,
Turkish, Irish, Chinese, Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, Odia and Kannada.
Andrej Blatnik has read fiction in Italy, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary,
Spain, Portugal, United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, France,
Greece, Turkey, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Iceland,
Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, India (Jaipur Literature
Festival), China, Australia, Canada (Toronto International Festival of
Authors) and the USA (Poets' House in New York City, Library of
Congress, University of Iowa, Norfolk State University, Old Dominion
University, Northwestern University, Intersection for the Arts in San
Francisco...). He was a participant of the International Writing
Program at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, USA, in 1993, and a guest
at the International Writers Center at the Old Dominion University,
Norfolk, Virginia, USA, in 1995, and Ledig House International Writers
Colony in 1998. He received various
fellowships, including Fulbright. He still loves to travel and read, business or pleasure. NEW: catalogue of translations, 2022 |
