Ilma Rakusa
/Switzerland, 1946
Ilma Rakusa was born 1946 in Slovakia, and grew up in Budapest, Ljubljana and Trieste before moving with her parents to Zurich. She studied Slavic and Romance Literature. In 1977, she made her debut with the German-language poetry collection "Wie Winter". Since then, she has published a number of further collections, including "Ein Strich durch alles" (1997, in Slovenian translation "Črta čez vse", 2006), "Love after love" (2001), "Impressum: Langsames Licht" (2016), "Kein Tag ohne" (2022), as well as books of prose, f.e. "Mehr Meer" (2009, in Slovenian translation "Morje modro moje", 2011), and essays. Ilma Rakusa is a literary translator from Russian (Marina Tsvetaeva), Serbo-Croatian (Danilo Kiš), Hungarian (Imre Kertész, Péter Nádas) and French (Marguerite Duras), and has been teaching Slavic Literature in Swiss universities. She was awarded numerous prizes, f.e. the Adelbert-von-Chamisso-Prize (2003), the Vilenica-Prize (2005), the Swiss Book Prize (2009), the Kleist-Prize (2019), and is member of the German Academy for Language and Literature. She lives in Zurich.
Beletrina has recently published a bilingual collection of poems Impressum: Upočasnjena svetloba. A selection of poems from Ilma Rakusa's last two collections was translated into Slovenian by Amalija Maček.
www.ilmarakusa.info