Taja Kramberger Slovenia

Taja Kramberger is a poet, writer, essayist, translator, and a qualified university teacher and researcher (PhD in modern history and historical anthropology). She either wrote or co-wrote four monographs, few dozen scientific articles and was Editor-in-Chief of the multilingual anthropological journal Monitor ZSA - Review of Historical, Social and other Anthropologies for ten years (2001-2011; 38 numbers). She has been active in the domain of human and civil rights, emancipation of women and social justice in the last 15 years, but also held many conferences on these themes and translated numerous texts about topics mentioned.

She has published nine books of poetry, two books for children, one drama, translated eight books of literature, among other writers also numerous poets including Claribel Alegría, Roberto Juarroz, Roque Dalton, June Jordan, Michele Obit and many others. She has written many essays, introductions, columns, and was an organizer and animator of various cultural activities while living in Slovenia and teaching at the university. There she was a president of Collegium atrium, a team of students and teachers at the faculty (between 2007 and 2009). Activities and events executed (more than 100 all together) were appreciated by the students and local people in Koper. Her poems have appeared in many languages in various literary anthologies and reviews in Slovenia and abroad. She participated at some 60 international poetry festivals. She was six times shortlisted for poetry awards and in 2007 she got the Award Veronika for the best book of 2006 (Quotidian Conversations). She was a member of some literary committees for awards (of the project Sealines in 2006, of the prize Zlata ptica/Golden Bird of the Liberal Academy in 2010-2011), and is an initiator and co-owner of the KONS-International Literary Award conferred for life-long continuous investments in literature, for pertinent manifested ethos and for long-lasting human attitude of poets and writers in the benefit of all people (laureates: Iztok Osojnik in 2011; Claribel Alegría in 2013).

In coastal town of Koper, where Taja Kramberger spent her childhood, a brand new university was formed in 2003 (the 3rd public university in Slovenia), she helped (by invitation of the initiators) from 2004 on - together with Drago B. Rotar - in establishing the social and program infrastructure of Faculty of humanities. She co-wrote the whole program of historical anthropology (12 courses). In 2010 within a sudden and absurd university purge of critical intellectuals she lost her academic position. She put a plaint at the court and the university finally had to pay her indemnity. In addition, ex-dean, who co-executed the purge, wanted to sue her poetry book Form the Edge of a Cliff (2011).

As the socio-political pressures and defamations by the local academic and literary micro-cosmos of a less than 2 million inhabitants didn't stop, she left the country in October 2012 and now lives and creates in Paris together with her husband Drago Rotar.

(2019)