META KUŠAR (born in Ljubljana, 1952), poet and essayist, is the author of six books of poems: Madeira (in bilingual editions: a Slovenian-English and Slovenian-Italian edition 1993), Svila in Lan/Silk and Flax (1997, Ljubljana), Ljubljana (2004, Ljubljana), and Jaspis/Jasper (2008, Ljubljana), Vrt/Garden (2014, Ljubljana), for which she was awarded the Veronika Best Poetry Collection of the Year Prize, and Azur/Himmelblau (2015, Celovec/Klagenfurt), which was nominated for the Jenko Prize. Her most recent poetry collection is Zmaj/Dragon (Litera 2021), while her collected poems are due to be published in 2022 by Mladinska knjiga. Her poetry collection Ljubljana came out in Slovakia (Ars Publications, Bratislava) in 2008 and in the English translation by the Arc Publications in England. It was followed by the translation into Polish in 2013, Serbian, Czech and in 2020 also into German (Mohorjeva-Hermagoras). Kušar has published also a book of interviews called Interviews (2009, Ljubljana) and essays What is poetic or a lesson in what is illegal (2011, Ljubljana) for which she recieved the national award for the best book of essays for 2012.
Her work has appeared in various anthologies, Afterwards, Slovenian Writing 1945 – 1995, The Fire Under the Moon; Contemporary Slovenian Poetry, La voix dans le corps/The Voice in the Body/Glas v telesu, Les Poètes de la Méditerrané, Gallimard, to name the main ones, and numerous literary magazines. Since 1980 she has regularly contributed cultural and historical shows on the Slovene National Radio and the RAI-Trieste. Occasionally she writes film scripts and directs them (Our Jurij Souček). She also directed a musical performance of her poetry, The Throne of Poetry, staged also internationally, in Washington (1999), London (2000), Lugano (2006). Lately she has authored and staged a number of multi-media literary events, the most recent one dedicated to remembering the poets and writers who have died this year, Remembering them, our memories (Cankarjev dom, Ljubljana).
