Photo: Aleksander Čufar
Alenka Jensterle Doležal (b. 1959) is a Slovenian poet, prose writer, and scholar. In 1983, she graduated in Slovenian Studies, Comparative Literature, and Philosophy from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ljubljana. In 2000, she completed her PhD with a dissertation on Antigone in West and South Slavic drama in the mid-20th century.
She has been teaching Slovenian and Slavic literatures at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in the Czech Republic for the past twenty-five years. She has also edited and co-edited two scientific paper volumes and two collective monographs, the most recent of which focuses on Ivan Cankar.
She is actively committed to promoting cultural and academic ties between Slovenia and the Czech Republic. For three years, she was the principal organizer of Mladi mesec, a poetry festival dedicated to Slovenian women poets in Prague, which resulted in the publication of a Slovenian-Czech anthology. In 2024, as part of the Vilenica International Literary Festival, she also served as editor-in-chief and translator of the Anthology of Contemporary Czech Literature Minout se přesně.
Cycles of her poetry and selections of her prose have been published in translation in Czech, Polish, English, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, Romanian, and Albanian, and have appeared in Slovenian, Czech, American, and Polish anthologies and literary journals. She has participated in various poetry festivals and literary readings in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovenia.
She has written six academic monographs, three novels, and seven poetry collections. She has received several awards for her scholarly and creative work, most recently for her latest collection, Ure in one (Otokom in pesnicam), which was honored with the Kresnice 2024 Award in 2025.
She is a member of the Slovene Writers’ Association and the Slovene PEN Centre.
