Photo: personal archive
Melita Koletnik is a translator, translation scholar and translator trainer at the Faculty of Arts, University of Maribor. As an enthusiastic young contributor, she reported for the Večer newspaper from the Bologna Children’s Bookfair in the early 2000s. Almost two decades later, she took part at the International Literary Translation and Creative Writing Summer School 2019 organised by the British Centre for Literary Translation in Norwich, UK, which for the first time included a Slovenian to English workshop, where she met Olivia Hellewell.
Melita Koletnik’s research interests include foreign language teaching for future translators and interpreters and, among other, literary translation into non-mother tongue, in which she frequently engages with her students. In this context, the literary journal Inventory, issued by the US Princeton University’s Department of Comparative Literature, published in 2016 a selection of Cosmic Fairytales by Rok Vilčnik, translated into English by Koletnik and her students, while the complete Cosmic Fairytales were published by the University of Maribor Press in 2023. The fairytales also introduced DARIA, a new book series dedicated to translations of literary and scholarly texts, and original volumes by authors researching in the fields of translation, interpreting, and related subjects.
