Drago Jančar
As a novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and essayist, Drago Jančar (1948) is a central figure in contemporary Slovenian literature. His writing has revealed an artistic power of formulating and expressing ideas that reach far beyond the spiritual and cultural sphere of his native country, making him the most translated Slovenian writer. His novels, essays and short stories have been translated into 21 languages and published in Europe, Asia and the United States. His dramas have also been staged by a number of foreign theatres, while back home they are frequently considered the highlights of the Slovenian theatrical season.
- “Jančar writes powerful, complex stories with an unostentatious assurance, and has a gravity which makes the tricks of more self-consciously modern writers look cheap [...] Whether they are psychological studies or parables, Jančar reports these episodes with a fine structural balance and, though at times clearly conversing with his literary antecedents, he wears his reading lightly [...] Throughout his stories, Jančar examines the nature of witness, personal, historical and authorial.”
- “Perpetual relevance is certainly one of Jančar’s unchanging qualities as his works appear to age splendidly well, a good indication of his emerging road to immortality as a classic of world literature.”
- “His work carries the tone, resonance and grandiosity of a great writer of European awareness.”
