Andrej Blatnik was born on May 22, 1963, in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he studied Comparative Literature and the Sociology of Culture and got his master’s in American Literature and PhD in Communication Studies. Read More He started his artistic career playing bass guitar in a punk band, was a freelance writer for five years, and now works as an editor for the Cankarjeva publishing house, teaches creative writing, and has been on the editorial board of Literatura since 1984. He is currently the president of the jury for the Vilenica Prize.

So far, he has published three novels, Plamenice in solze (Torches and Tears, 1987), Tao ljubezni (Closer to Love, 1996) and Spremeni me (Change Me, 2008), as well as four collections of short stories: Šopki za Adama venijo (Bouquets for Adam Fade, 1983), Biografije brezimenih (Biographies of the Nameless, 1989), Menjave ko (Skinswaps, 1990) and Zakon želje (Law of Desire, 2000). In addition to this, he has published a collection of essays on contemporary American literature, entitled Labirinti iz papirja (Paper Labyrinths, 1994), a collection of cultural criticism entitled Gledanje čez ramo (Looking Over the Shoulder, 1996) and Neonski pečati (Neon Seals, 2005), a collection of essays about literature in the digital age.

He has written for television and radio, and translated several books from English, including Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky. He has won numerous major Slovenian literary awards, and his short stories have been translated and published in magazines and anthologies in over twenty languages.