Product details
- ISBN 9781564789976
- Publication Date: 31 Mar 2016
- Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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I Saw Her That Night, a love story in time of war, is a novel about a few years in the life and mysterious disappearance of Veronika Zarnik, a young bourgeois woman from Ljubljana, sucked into the whirlwind of a turbulent period in history. We follow her story from the perspective of five different characters, who also talk about themselves, as well as the troubled Slovenian times before and during World War II; times that swallowed, like a Moloch, not only the people of various beliefs involved in historical events, but also those who lived on the fringes of tumultuous events, which they did not even fully comprehend—they only wanted to live. But “only” to live was an illusion: it was a time when, even under the seemingly safe and idyllic shelter of a manor house in Slovenia, it was impossible to avoid the rushing train of violence.
Drago Jancar was born in 1948 in Maribor, Slovenia, and is one of the best-known Slovenian writers at home and abroad. After studying law, he worked as a journalist, editor, and a freelance writer, and traveled to both the US and Germany. As President of the Slovenian P.E.N. Centre (1987 – 1991), Jancar was engaged in the rise of democracy in Slovenia and Yugoslavia and has been described as “the seismologist of a chaotic history.” I Saw Her That Night won the Best Foreign Book Prize (Prix du meilleur livre etranger) in 2014 and the Kresnik Award for best novel of the year. In 2011 he was awarded the European Prize for Literature. His novels and short stories have been translated in several languages and his plays have been produced on many on American stages. He now lives in Ljubljana.
Michael Biggins's translations of works by Slovene authors such as Drago Jancar, Tomaz Salamun, Vladimir Bartol and Lojze Kovacic have been published by Harcourt, Archipelago and Dalkey Archive, among others. In 2015 he was awarded the Lavrin Diploma of the Society of Slovene Literary Translators for distinguished contributions to the advancement of Slovene literature in English. He lives in Seattle.
