Simona Škrabec (Ljubljana, Slovenia, 1968), an essayist, translator, and university lecturer, has a degree in German Philology from the University of Ljubljana and, in 2002, obtained a PhD in Comparative Literature and Theory of Literature from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She combines teaching, translating, cultural activism, and writing, as well as writing regularly as a literary critic and being involved in the running of such literary magazines as L’Espill, L’Avenç, and the online review Visat.

As an author, she is known for literary essays exploring the history of literature from a comparative standpoint and making connections between the literary fact and the cultural and social milieu. These notably include L’atzar i la lluita (2005) and Una pàtria prestada (2017). In the former, which has been translated into several languages, she writes about Central Europe and overcoming the splitting of Europe into two halves. In the latter, she offers a critical reading of the role of literature in shaping the Catalan identity. In her most recent essay, El desig d’ordre (2023), she contemplates the theory of cultural, social, and existential crossroads in the contemporary world. In an earlier work, Torno del bosc amb les mans tenyides (2019), her most personal and literary work, she considers her place in the world.

For years now, her work as a translator has fostered a literary exchange between Slovenia and Catalonia, with editions in Slovenian of Catalan writers like Jaume Cabré and Maria Barbal, while also introducing into the Catalan publishing domain works by several Slavic writers.

In the more academic terrain, she has published L’estirp de la solitud (2002), on Central European fiction, for which she received the Josep Carmer Award for Literary Theory, and she also contributed to the volume To Be Translated or Not to Be (2007), on literary translation and globalisation.

She has been President of the Translation and Literary Rights Committee of PEN International and is a member of the GETCC Research Group at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and of ESCORE at the Pompeu Fabra University and, since 2023, has been editor of the cultural magazine L’Avenç.

She is a member of the Associació d'Escriptors en Llengua Catalana (AELC – Association of Catalan Language Writers). 

Web page: Irene Zurrón and Bet Ajenjo for AELC.
Documentation and photographs: Author’s personal files.
Transaltion: Julie Wark.