About the Author and Translator

Cvetka Lipuš was born in 1966 in the town of Železna Kapla/Eisenkappel, which is situated in the Slovenian-German bilingual part of the Austrian province of Carinthia (Koroška/Kärnten). Southern Carinthia includes several districts where the Slovenian-speaking population firmly maintains its linguistic identity. Writing in Slovenian has never been in question for Cvetka; other writers of the Slovenian minority have meanwhile shifted to German, the language of the majority population.

She studied comparative literature and Slavistics at the universities of Celovec/Klagenfurt (Carinthia), Ljubljana (Slovenia), and Vienna. She lived in the United States from 1995 to 2009 and studied library and information science at the University of Pittsburgh. She moved to Salzburg, Austria, in 2009.

She has published seven collections of poetry: the first three in Klagenfurt, the remainder in Ljubljana. The poems in the four collections preceding this one (all mentioned above, in the afterword) were written in the United States; Kaj smo, ko smo was written after her move to Salzburg. The seven thus represent her life in three countries. Five of these have been published in book form in German translation. Among her awards, she has received the Carinthian Provincial Literature Prize; a grant from the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Art and Culture; the Austrian State Grant for Literature; and, most recently, Slovenia’s prestigious Prešeren Fund Award, in 2016.

Tom Priestly was born in Uganda in 1937, grew up in England, and emigrated to Canada in 1966. He taught Russian language and Slavic linguistics at the University of Alberta and conducted research on dialect structure and language maintenance in the Slovenian-speaking part of Austria. Since 1992, he has published translations and co-translations of the work of over fifteen Slovenian poets into English, ranging from seminal work by the nineteenth-century luminary Francè Prešeren to recent popular children’s songs.