Lipuš first Slovenian author to receive Grand Austrian State Prize
Ljubljana, 17 December - Slovenian minority writer from the Austrian region of Carinthia Florjan Lipuš became the first ever Slovenian author to receive the Grand Austrian State Prize. The 81-year-old said that by giving him the highest accolade for outstanding artistic achievements, Austria "has officially recognised that Slovenian is an equal Austrian language".
Ljubljana
Writer Florjan Lipuš.
Photo: Daniel Novakovič/STA
File photo
Considered one of the top contemporary authors writing in Slovenian, Lipuš also received the Prešeren Prize in 2004. His best known work is The Errors of Young Tjaž (1972), an intimate portrait of an angsty young man struggling to cope in a nationally and ideologically divided world.
He has also written about the expulsion and killings of Slovenians in Carinthia, the Holocaust and the majority population looking down on the Slovenian minority. He is thus sometimes compared to Slovenian minority author Boris Pahor, whose work is testimony to what the Slovenian minority in Italy has been through.
"I basically repeat and repeat one and the same story all over again ... my work is only partly testimony of what is going on in my environment ... it is about filtering what exists and especially what does not but should," Lipuž said.