Lojze Kovačič

Lojze Kovačič was born in 1928 in Basel, Switzerland. His father was a Slovenian immigrant, and his mother was German. In 1938 the family was expelled to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia because the father did not have Swiss citizenship. It was during the Second World War that Kovačič began to write, and just before the war ended that he published his first literary sketch, in the magazine Slovenska mladina (Slovenian Youth). The sketch was a description of his father’s death. After the war, the family was regarded as politically dubious because, in those socially trying times, they had petitioned to emigrate to Germany. The writer’s mother, sister and niece were forcibly expelled from Yugoslavia to a refugee camp in Carinthia, Austria, though Lojze Kovačič remained in Slovenia. He continued his studies at a Ljubljana secondary school. He published his predominantly autobiographical literary pieces in Mladina (Youth), Mladinska zarja (Youth Dawn) and Mladinska revija (The Youth Magazine). In the epochal novel Prišleki (The Newcomers), he described his life from the time of his departure from Basel to Slovenia up to the time of his military service there. The novel Resničnost (Reality), meanwhile, describes the events of the war. In the late 1950s he worked as a librarian, before entering teacher’s college in Ljubljana, graduating in 1962. For a while he was employed as an editor, then he became a dramaturge in a puppet theatre, and later a teacher of puppeteering in a “Pioneer Home.” A decade later he was employed in the realm of literary education. He died in 2004 in Ljubljana. With more than ten novels written for adults, along with collections of short stories and works for children and young adults, Lojze Kovačič ranks among the leading masters of 20^th-century Slovenian fiction. Also not to be overlooked are his essays.