Miriam Drev

Photo Alenka Slavinec

Modus vivendi of Miriam Drev, a poetess, writer, literary translator from English and German as well as a literary critic born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, are books.

She graduated from the Faculty of Arts, Dept. of Comparative Literature and English. With her family she spent seven years in Vienna where her book for children Šviga Does Wee-Wee (1995) was written as also her first book of poems Time’s Square (2002). The poetry collections Births (2007), Water Line (2008) and In the Kitchen a Cherry Tree Would Grow (2012) followed. In 2017 her book of poems Tirso was published, and in 2022  Ancestral Healing.

Miriam Drev wrote three novels: In the Gilded City (2012), Restless (2014) and To the Day They Belong and to the Night (2021) in the form of letters, which was nominated for the Kresnik prize.

Her poems have been translated into English, German, Italian, Polish, Czech, French, Serbian and Croatian and are published in several anthologies and literary magazines.

She has translated more than one hundred books and many famous authors were issued in the Slovene language for the first time on her initiative, e.g. Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, R. W. Emerson, Arundhati Roy, A. S. Byatt, Janet Frame etc. In 2014 and 2016 she was among the nominees for the cultural award »Mira«, PEN.

She lives as an independent writer and translator in Ljubljana.