Carolyn Forché
/United States of America, 1950
Carolyn Forché (1950) is an American poet, translator, and human rights activist. Her debut poetry collection won the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition in 1976 for the best young poet. Having received a scholarship, she then spent some time in El Salvador and worked for Amnesty International. It was often these experiences that served as the foundation for her following poetry collections, which have regularly received the most prestigious American literary accolades. She held many university lectures and does so to this day. She is also an established and acclaimed translator (she translated authors such as Georg Trakl, Mahmoud Darwish and others) and widely respected for her human rights activism.
Carolyn Forché's creativity is heavily influenced by her humanitarian experience. She has spent over four decades waking sleeping, comfortably situated readers with a heavy reliance on people’s testimonies and experiences. Her Poetry of witness, nestled in between the monstrosities of Auschwitz and refugees on the Rio Grande River, intensely and honestly explores pain and suffering, resulting in her being dubbed a political poet by many critics, because she is an exact observer of the violence and horrors of our time. She incessantly reminds us on the need for tolerant mutual relations. The selection of her poetry, through which the readers can come in touch with her creative opus, was prepared and translated by Kristina Kočan. Most of the poems in the selection is from the collection In the Lateness of the World (2020), for which the author was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Forché will also write an autopoetic essay for the Slovenian release of her work.
The poet is coming to the festival with the support of U.S. Embassy in Slovenia.