Alojz Rebula

Alojz Rebula (June 21, 1924 – October 23, 2018) was a Slovene writer, playwright, essayist, and translator, and a prominent member of the Slovene minority in Italy. He lived and worked in Villa Opicina in the Province of Trieste, Italy. He was a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Life Rebula was born in the ethnically Slovene village of San Pelagio near Duino, in what was then the Kingdom of Italy. Because of the anti-Slavic Italianization policies of the Fascist regime, Rebula could not have an education in his native language. He attended Italian-language schools, where he became acquainted with Italian culture and literature. He went to the gymnasium of Gorizia and later the lyceum in Udine, which he graduated from in 1944. After the end of World War II, he moved to Yugoslavia. He studied classical philology at the University in Ljubljana, from where he graduated in 1949. In 1951, he moved back to Italy because of the pressures of the Communist regime. The same year the authorities prohibited him from entering Yugoslavia for a second time, because he had publicly protested in Trieste newspapers against the suppression of the publication of the novel Listina (The Document) by Edvard Kocbek in Slovenia.

After the democratization and independence of Slovenia in 1990 and 1991, Rebula worked as a columnist for several Catholic journals and magazines in Slovenia. He lived and worked in his native village in the Italian part of the Karst region. Rebula died on October 23, 2018, at the age of 94.

He also translated Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes and Plautus' Miles Gloriosus into Slovene as well as Slovene authors such as Kocbek and Levstik into Italian.

Rebula was awarded several prizes for his writing. In 1969 he received the Prešeren Fund Award, the so-called "small" Prešeren award, for the novel V Sibilnem vetru (In Sybil’s Wind). In 1995 he received the Prešeren Award, the highest Slovenian prize for cultural achievements, for artistic achievement for his life's work. In 1997 he was awarded the Acerbi Prize for his novel In Sybil’s Wind in the Italian translation, and in 2005 the Kresnik Award for A Nocturne for the Littoral, which the jury voted the best Slovene novel of the year.

Rebula died on October 23, 2018, at the age of 94.

List of works Prose Devinski sholar, novel, (The Duino Scholar, 1954) Vinograd rimske cesarice , short stories, (Vineyard of the Roman Empress, 1956) Klic v Sredozemlje, novel, (A Call to the Mediterranean, 1957) Senčni ples novel, (Shadow Dance, (1960) V Sibilinem vetru novel, (In Sybil's Wind, 1968) Divji golob novel, (Wild Dove, 1972) Zeleno izgnanstvo novel, (Green Exile, 1981) Jutri čez Jordan novel, (Tomorrow over the River Jordan, 1988) Kačja roža novel, (Snake Flower, 1994) Maranathà ali Leto 999 novel, (Maranathà or the Year 999, 1996) Cesta s cipreso in zvezdo novel, (The Road with the Cypress and the Star, 1998) Jutranjice za Slovenijo novel, (Matins for Slovenia, 2000) Nokturno za Primorsko novel, (Nocturne for the Littoral, 2004)

Plays Savlov demon, six plays with a religious theme, (Saul's Demon, 1985) Operacija Timava, two acts, (The Timava Operation, 1993)