PEN Club de México	PEN México: Pajaritas de Papel	Ciudad de México 2003: Congreso Mundial del PEN	Quién es Quién

PEN Eslovenia

Veno Taufer
President

Date of birth: 1933

Place of birth: Ljubljana, Slovenija

Office Address

Street and number: Tomsiceva 12

Zip code: 1000

City: Ljubljana

Country: Slovenija

Telephone number: +386 1 425 48 47

Fax: +386 1 425 48 47

E-mail: slopen@guest.arnes.si

Home Address

Street and number: Ilirska ulica 4

District/neighborhood:/

Zip code: 1000

City: Ljubljana

State/Department:/

Country: Slovenija

Telephone number: +386 1 431 83 64

Information For The Curriculum Vitae

PEN Center to which you belong: Slovene PEN Center.

Post in steering Committee or other Committees of PEN Center: President of the Slovene PEN Center,  Chair of the Writers for Peace Committee of the International PEN.

Date of admission to PEN (d/m/y):1.6.1983

Education: M.A. in comparative literature from the University in Ljubljana

Profession: poet, playwright, esseyist, translator, editor

Working experience: Editor of the literary magazine Rewiew 57 until it was banned in 1959. Taufer was also a manager of the experimental theatre group Oder 57. For many years he worked as a journalist (BBC - London, Ljubljana) before founding and directing the International Literary Festival Vilenica in the early 80's which was then in the communist governed Slovenia understood as an important part of the engagement for democratization as well as in the case of Taufer's Committee for Freedom of Speech and Writing, the first "unofficial" public body of Civil Society, he in 1985 initiated in Slovene Writers' Association. In 1989 Taufer was co-founder of the first Slovene democratic party and co-author of the 1989 May Declaration, the basic document of the pluralistic democracy in Slovenia and of its independence.

Literary style: Taufer's poetry represents a linguistic turn in modernist poetry and was, with its cross referenced structure and explorations of linguistic possibilities, a harbinger of postmodernist writing in Slovenian literature. His poetry attemps to express the paradoxes of fleeting existence that faces being and nothingness on the top of the ruins of metaphysics and hisotical eschatologies. Through palimpsestic and semantic indeterminacy Taufer's verses are trying to bring into awareness the experience of fragility and fragmentariness of any truth.

Works published: Taufer has published 16 poetry collections of which the first one, Leaden Stars, in 1958 had to come out as a "samizdat". The seventinth, Second Sonnets, is due to come out next spring. He is as well author of several books of plays and essays.

Works translated, edited or coordinated works (editors): His poetry has been included in many anthologies (World Poetry, Norton, Mew York, 1999; God and Mortals, Modern Poetry on Classical Myths, Oxford Univ. Press, 2001) and published in separate books in several countries (Waterlings, Northwestern Univ. Press, 2000). His translations, among others authors, of T.S.Eliot, Wallace Stevens, E. Pound as well as G.M. Hopkins and Ted Hughes were met with high acclaim.

Prizes, distinctions, scholarships: Great Preseren Prize in 1996, Ljubljana, Slovenija International Central European Award in 1995, Vienna, Austria International "Bethlen Gabor" in 1989, Budapest, Hungary "Branko Miljkovic" award for the best Yugoslav poetry collection in 1988 "Simon Jenko" award for the best Slovene poetry book in 1987 Laureate of The Lucic'c Sonnets' days on Islan Hvar in 2002, Croatia International "Jan Smrek" Prize for poetry in 2002, Bratislava, Slovakia

Updated (d/m/y): 5 th of February, 2003

DELEGADOS AL CONGRESO 2003