Trafika Europe 11 - Swiss Delights

About the Authors

Ilma Rakusa ILMA RAKUSA (born in Rimavská Sobota, Slovakia – formerly the Hungarian town of Rimaszombat, 1945) is one of Switzerland’s most prominent poets and an essayist on Central European and Russian literature, as well as a noted translator. She spent her early childhood in Budapest, Ljubljana, and Trieste, then moved to Zürich with her parents in 1951. She studied Slavic and Romance Languages and Literatures in Zürich, Paris, and Leningrad, writing her doctoral dissertation on “The Theme of Loneliness in Russian Literature”. Since 1977, she has been a freelance writer, journalist, and translator from Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, and French and a lecturer at the University of Zürich. She is a member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung. Her many awards include the Petraca-Übersetzerpreis (1991), the Leipziger Buchpreis zur Europäischen Verständigung (1998), the Schiller Preis (1998), the Adelbert von Chamisso-Preis (2003), the Vilenica Preis (2005), and the Swiss Book Prize in 2009 for Meer Mehr .

Alongwithhermemoir, MehrMeer, Rakusa has published twenty collections of poetry, short stories, essays, and

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