Tomaž Šalamun

Tomaž Šalamun was born in Zagreb, Croatia, raised in Koper, Slovenia, and now makes his home in Ljubljana. He has published 25 volumes of poems in his native Slovenia and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. The Selected Poems Of Tomaž Šalamun, edited and in large part translated by Charles Simic, was the poet's debut collection in English, brought out in 1988 as part of Ecco Press's prestigious Modern European Poetry series. It was followed by The Shepherd, The Hunter (Pedernal, 1992), The Four Questions Of Melancholy (White Pine Press, 1997), Feast (Harcourt, 2000), and The Book for My Brother (Harvest Books, 2006). He was a participant in the University of Iowa's International Writing Program in 1987.

His recent books in English are The Book For My Brother and Row. Woods and Chalices will be published by Harcourt in Spring 2008.

"It was 19 years ago, almost to the month, that I first met Tomaž Šalamun, when he showed up in Chattanooga wearing a long dark coat, and exuding a kind of infectious, very unselfconscious energy that immediately won over the students. This poet, who has now gone on to publish over 30 books, who has been translated into just about every european language and several others, who has won the major Slovene Award, the Prešeren Prize, as well as the Mladost prize, fellowships to Iowa's International Writing program, Yaddo and the Macdowell Colony, and has been a Fulbright exchange poet, has become one of a handful of major poets in the world. The poems he read back then were enthralling in their ability to create a unique world beside the one we live in yet grafted from it. As an early translator, Sonja Kravanja, says, he "challenge[s] the established processes of human thinking." But isn't that precisely what a poet should do?"

Biography selection above from the Tomaž Šalamun official homapage.

Poetry |International Writing Program
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