Mila Haugová Slovakia

Slovakian poet Mila Haugová was born in 1942 in Budapest and spent her early childhood in post-war Europe moving from place to place in Czechoslovakia before settling in 1954 in Zajaca Dolina with her family. Following her studies at agricultural college (in the early 1960s a refuge for kindred spirits with an interest in the arts), she took up a teaching post in an agricultural technical school in Levice, married a colleague in 1967 and emigrated to Canada. A year later she returned and, in 1972, moved to Bratislava where she was employed as a teacher in an elementary school and, in her spare time, immersed herself in literary work.

Her first collection of poems was published under a pseudonym in 1980, with her next collection - published under her own name - appearing in 1983. Since that time she has published fourteen further collections of poetry, the most recent of which (Plant with a Dream, Vertical) appeared in 2006. Her poetry has been translated into German, English, Polish, Russian, French, Dutch, Norwegian, Hungarian and Bulgarian.

A former Literary Editor of the literary review Romboid in Bratislava, Mila Haugová is a member of the Association of Slovak Writers, the translators' Association and of Grazer Autoren Versammlung, Austria. She has held a number of prestigious fellowships, and has read throughout mainland Europe (in Paris, Strassbourg, Freiburg, Vienna, Budapest, Prague, The Hague, Cologne, Munich, Florence, Genoa, Rome, Berlin among others) as well as throughout the UK, and in Iowa, USA.

As well as being one of Slovakia's leading poets, she is also highly regarded as a translator, and has translated the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Anne Saxton, Ingeborg Bachmann, Georg Trakl, Paul Celan, Else Lasker-Schuler, Janos Polinszky, James Wright, Ted Hughes, Sarah Kirsch, Friedericke Mayrocker, Shuntaro Tanikawa and, with F. Kuwahara, the old Japanese poetry of Manjoshu.

Mila Haugová lives with her companion and her daughter in Levice and Bratislava, Slovakia. For the last five years she has taught Creative Writing at The Invisible College in Bratislava, as well as contributing to many literary magazines and the radio. She is currently working on her autobiography, Inside the Mirror.

(2020)