Maja Vidmar, born in 1961, is from Nova Gorica and lives in Ljubljana as a freelance poet. Her debut Razdalje telesa (Distances of the Body, 1984) sold fifteen hundred copies, stirring up much attention, among other traits for its refined eroticism. She has published seven poetry collections: besides the first one also Način vezave (Ways of Binding 1988), Ob vznožju (At the Base, 1998), Prisotnost (Presence, 2005), Sobe (Rooms, 2008), Kako se zaljubiš (How to Fall in Love, 2012), and Minute prednosti (Minutes of Advantage, 2015), as well as two books of selected poems Ihta smeri (Urge of Direction, 1989) and Petdeset pesmi (Fifty Poems, 2015). With her concise and to-the-point poetic language, Maja Vidmar grants expression to everything she’s part of and everything that’s part of her. In the past few years, this has been organically complemented by her involvement with gestalt therapy, which serves as the guiding principle behind her poetry workshops.
Maja Vidmar’s book Presence was awarded the Jenko Prize as well as the Prešeren Foundation Award, bringing her the Vienna scholarship “Groβer Preis für Osteuropäische Literatur”. In 2007 she was awarded the Umberto Saba Award at the international poetry contest Trieste Scritture di Frontiera, and for the book Rooms received the prize of the Network of Literary Cities, Pazin, in 2009. Her recent decade of creativity earned her the distinguished Velenjica – Cup of Immortality in 2015. Maja Vidmar’s verse is widely translated, with seven of her poetry books appearing in foreign languages: Leibhaftige Gedichte (Droschel, 1999), for which she received the Hubert Burda Foundation Prize for young, Akt (Meandar, 1999), Molitva tijela (Prayer of the Body, Tugra, 2007), Gegenwart (Edition Korrespondenzen, 2007), Način vezivanja (Udruženje književnika Banja Luka, 2009), E il mondo si scolora (Ibiskos Editore, 2010), and Izby a ine basne (Studna, 2015). Many of her poems appear in Slovene and international literary anthologies.
