Aleš Šteger

Šteger is a judge for the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Poetry Today, The Antioch Review, Volume 70, Number 1, 2012 about “The Book of Things”

Štegers books have been translated into 16 languages and his poems appeared in internationally renowned magazines and newspapers as The New Yorker, Die Zeit, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, TLS and many others. Among other prizes and honours his English translation of Knjiga reči (The Book of Things, BOA Editions, 2010) won two mayor U.S. translation awards (BTBA award and AATSEL).

In 1998 Šteger won the Veronika Award for his poetry collection Kašmir and in 2008 he won the Rožanc Award, the highest prize for essays written in Slovene, for Berlin. In 2019 he was a contributor to A New Divan: A Lyrical Dialogue Between East and West (Gingko Library).

From 1995 to 2004 and from 2008 to present, he was the initiator and programme director of the international poetry festival Days of Poetry and Wine (www.stihoteka.si). He worked also as programme director of the Terminal 12 - programme strand at the Maribor 2012 European Capital of Culture. Since 2012 he is working on a performative writing project Written on Site, making one public writing performance each year. Among his editorial work, the most noticeable is a new revisited collection of poems by Edvard Kocbek published in 2004, which includes a number of Kocbek's unpublished poems as well as an insightful essay on Kocbek's poetic language written by Šteger. His editorial work also includes other major Slovenian poets, Gregor Strniša, Dane Zajc, Tomaž Šalamun and Niko Grafenauer.

Aleš Šteger (born 31 May 1973) is a Slovene poet, writer, editor and literary critic. Aleš belongs to a generation of writers that started to publish right after the fall of Yugoslavia. His first poetry collection Šahovnice ur (1995) was sold out in three weeks after publication and indicated a new generation of Slovenian artists and writers.