Tomaž Šalamun

Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun was one of Europe’s most prominent poets of his generation and was a leader of the Eastern European avant-garde. He was born in Zagreb, Croatia and raised in Koper, Slovenia. Early in his career he edited the literary magazine Perspektive and was briefly jailed on political charges. He studied art history at the University of Ljubljana, where he found poetry suddenly, as a revelation, describing its arrival in a 2004 interview as “stones from the sky.”

Šalamun is the author of more than 50 collections of poetry in Slovenian and English. He published his first collection, Poker (1966), at the age of 25. His poetry, using elements of surrealism and polyphony, was influenced by the work of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Charles Simic, and Charles Baudelaire. His collections of poetry in English include The Selected Poems of Tomaž Šalamun (1998); The Shepherd, the Hunter (1992); The Four Questions of Melancholy (1997); Feast (2000), Ballad for Metka Krasovec (2001, translated by Michael Biggins), Poker (2008, translated by Joshua Beckman and Šalamun), Row! (2006), The Book for My Brother (2006), Woods and Chalices (2008, translated by Brian Henry), There's the Hand and There's the Arid Chair (2009), and On the Tracks of Wild Game (2012). His most recent books, published in English posthumously, are Andes (2016) and Druids (2019), and Opera Buffa (2022). His poetry has been widely anthologized and translated into more than 20 languages.

Šalamun won the Jenko Prize, Slovenia’s Prešeren and Mladost Prizes, and a Pushcart Prize. Šalamun and his German translator, Fabjan Hafner, were awarded the European Prize for Poetry by the German city of Muenster. He was a Fulbright Fellow at Columbia University and taught occasionally in the United States. When he joined the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, he met the Finnish American poet Anselm Hollo, who later became one of Šalamun’s translators. His work has appeared in over seventy journals and magazines internationally and he has published 15 poetry collections in English.

Šalamun was a member of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Art and lived in Ljubljana, Slovenia, until his death in late 2014.