Writer Vlady Kociancich dies
Buenos Aires, 30 March - Vlady Kociancich, an award-winning Argentinian writer of Slovenian descent, died in Buenos Aires last Friday aged 80. She wrote seven novels, including Los bajos de temor, which has been released in Slovenian as Plitvine Strahu (Shallows of Fear).
Kociancich is considered one of the greatest contemporary Latin American writers. Apart from novels she also wrote short-stories, which have been translated into several languages.
As a writer she falls in the tradition of the literary greats Jorge Louis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, both of whom were her friends for more than three decades, writes the newspaper Delo, which cites the Argentinian media in reporting on her death. Radio Slovenija has also reported on her death.
A writer as well as a translator and literary historian, Kociancich won several literary prizes for her work, including the Jorge Luis Borges Prize in 1988.
Kociancich was born in Buenos Aires in 1941. Her father was a Slovenian emigrant from Gorica. She always said that it was him and his stories about his homeland that introduced her to the world of literature.
As a student of literature at the University of Buenos Aires she made friends with Borges, who thought highly of her, as did Adolfo Bioy Casares.
During a visit to Slovenia she told Radio Slovenija that she wrote because the world was so broad and so deep that everything in it needed the voices that literature made possible.