Sebastijan Pregelj

Sebastijan Pregelj (born 29 July 1970) is a Slovenian writer. He began publishing short stories in the second half of the 1990s and later became known primarily as a novelist. Several of his novels have been shortlisted for the Kresnik Award for the best Slovenian novel of the year. His fiction often combines historical settings, legends and contemporary reality with elements of the magical, spiritual and mystical.

In 2020, Pregelj received the Cankar Award for V Elvisovi sobi (In Elvis's Room), a novel about a generation coming of age during the gradual disintegration of Yugoslavia. The novel has been translated into Italian, Croatian, English, Swedish and Armenian. The Cankar Award is presented for the best original literary work published in Slovenia in the preceding year.

Pregelj's works have been translated into Slovak, German, Polish, English, Italian, Croatian, Swedish, Macedonian and Armenian.

Since 2014, Pregelj has also written for children. His first books for younger readers were the two Babujan the Ghost stories, followed by the seven-volume series Tales from the End of the Stone Age (2016–2021), set among prehistoric pile-dwellers. In 2022, he began the series Tales from the Duchy of Carniola, set in the time of the seventeenth-century scholar and polymath Johann Weikhard von Valvasor. He also writes the Medo in Pujsi (A Bear and a Piggie) stories for younger children, which first appeared in the magazine Cicido and were later published as picture books. The stories were adapted into the puppet production Medo in Pujsi at the [Puppet Theatre], which premiered in 2024.

The sixth volume of Tales from the End of the Stone Age, Vrnitev (The Return), received the Večernica Award in 2021. Twelve of Pregelj's children's books have received the Golden Pear quality label, awarded to outstanding children's and young adult books published in Slovenia.

Pregelj is a member of the Slovene Writers' Association and the Slovene PEN Centre. He lives and works in Ljubljana.