Polonca Kovač

Prolific youth literature author and translator Polonca Kovač was born on 19 February 1937 in Ljubljana, where she graduated in Italian Language and Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Arts. She led courses in Italian and German at the Cene Štupar Public Education Centre in Ljubljana, going on to work for the capital’s Youth Information and Counselling Centre and teaching German at the Centre for Foreign Language Study. She is now an independent cultural worker.

Polonca Kovač’s trove of youth literature is colourful and diverse. Its many genres encompass fairy tales, fantasy and realist prose, plays, TV scripts and educational literature. For her children’s story Kaja in njena družina (Kaja and her Family, MKZ 1999) she received the Večernica youth literature prize. Polonca also translates from foreign languages, where her rich opus of youth and children’s literature translation is crowned by the complete Grimms’ Fairy Tales (MKZ 1993), appearing for the first time in Slovene in full.