Aleš Debeljak Slovenia

Aleš Debeljak, a poet and essayist, holds a Ph.D. in Social Thought from Syracuse University, New York and is a director of Center for Cultural and Religious Studies in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He has won several awards, including the Slovenian National Book Award, the Miriam Lindberg Israel Poetry for Peace Prize (Tel Aviv) and Chiqu Poetry Prize (Tokyo). His books have appeared in English, Japanese, German, Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Lithuanian, Finnish, French, Italian, Spanish and Romanian translations. His recent non-fiction books in English include The Hidden Handshake: National Identity and European Postcommunism, Reluctant Modernity: The Institution of Art and its Historical Forms, Twilight of the Idols: Recollections of a Lost Yugoslavia, and three books of poems Anxious Moments, The City and the Child, Dictionary of Silence.

(2006)