Marjan Strojan

1949, Slovenia

Born 1949 in Ljubljana. He is a poet, translator, film critic; raised on his uncle's farm in the fifties; studied philosophy and comparative literature in the seventies; in 1979 joined the BBC’s Yugoslav Section in London. In 1996 he took a part at the Modern British Literature Seminar, Cambridge;  2005 a fellow of IWP at the Iowa University and a resident writer at the Sitka Institute, Alaska; in 2008 resident writer at The Baptist University in Hong Kong. Currently he is with the Cultural program of Radio Slovenia in Ljubljana. Strojan published six books of poetry and many translations, among them a selection from The Canterbury Tales and the selections of Robert Frost’s, James Joyce’s, Lavinia Greenlaw’s and Sydney Lea’s poetry. He edited and for the most part translated the first comprehensive Anthology of English Poetry in Slovenian; for his translations of Beowulf and of Milton’s Paradise Lost he received the Sovrè Translation Award for the year 1996 and 2004 respectively. Marjan Strojan was made an honorary fellow of University of Iowa and of Hong Kong Baptist University and is the current president of the Slovenian PEN.