On Thursday, April 22, at 6:30PM PDT / 9:30PM EST, Folio will host translator Michael Biggins to speak on Book Two of Lojze Kovačič’s Newcomers. Tickets for the event are $10, available for purchase here. The event will stream live on Zoom.

Michael Biggins is responsible as translator for a number of the classics of twentieth-century Slovenian literature published in English, including Slovenia’s internationally best-selling novel of all time, Vladimir Bartol’s Alamut (Scala House 2004, reissued by North Atlantic 2007). In 2021 he became the first non-Slovenian recipient of the Primož Trubar Award for lifelong contributions to advancing and preserving Slovenia’s written cultural heritage. President of the international Society for Slovene Studies since 2017, and Honorary Consul of Slovenia for Washington State since 2018, he lives in Seattle and teaches Slovenian language and literature, as well as Slavic to English literary translation at the University of Washington. He works as curator of the University library’s nationally significant collection of over a half million volumes, in more than twenty languages, across the spectrum of Slavic and East European studies.

Lojze Kovačič was born in Basel in 1928 to a German mother and Slovenian father. In 1938 the family was exiled to Slovenia, where Kovačič lived until his death in 2004. Considered to be one of Slovenia’s most significant authors of the 20th century, his works often relate to his own life and are constantly concerned with existential topics like life and death, displacement and exile, dream and reality. He has been compared to great Central European writers such as Danilo Kis, Sandor Marai, Imre Kertész and Ismail Kadaré. His work, which has now been rediscovered in several countries, consists of ten novels, novellas, essays and children’s books.