Translator

SANJA LOVRENČIĆ

Sanja Lovrenčić was born in 1961 in Knin (Croatia). Since her earliest childhood she has lived in Zagreb, where she finished elementary school, classical grammar school and music high school. She studied art history and indology at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, and graduated art history at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade (1985). She began writing poetry and translating it from French and English during her studies; her first poems were published in the magazine Quorum, and she self-published her first collection of poems Insula dulcamara in 1987. In the late eighties she submitted her work for the first time to a public competition for a radio drama. After 1990 – having won first prize for both a radio drama and a radio play for children – she closely collaborated for several years with the Drama Programme of Croatian Radio as an author and translator. In 1994 she published two books in two different fields which are equally in the focus of her interest: the collection of poems Scarlet Fabric (edited by Hrvoje Pejaković) and the book of stories for children Esperel, the City of Small Wonders. By 2007 she published four more collections of stories for children (she won the Grigor Vitez Award for The Four Terrible Foof-Eaters) and two short novels, and after that she wrote only texts for picture books. She considers poetry to be the basis of her literary work and her most important field of activity, and she has never stopped writing it.

In addition to writing, she does a lot of translation work. Her translated books fall into several groups: social sciences, literature for adults, literature for children, music history; she won the Cyclops Award (2012) for her translation of Virginia Woolf’s collection of short fiction The Haunted House.