Guest of the ilb 2001, 2002
Ilma Rakusa was born in 1946 in Rimavsk� Sobota,
Slovakia, as the daughter of a Slovakian father and a Hungarian
mother. She spent the first years of her childhood in Budapest,
Ljubljana and Trieste, before her family moved to Zurich in 1951.
She studied Slavic and Roman Philology in Zurich, Paris and St.
Petersburg from 1965 to 1971.
Rakusa obtained her doctorate in 1971 and has been an instructor at the
Slavic Institute of the University of Zurich since 1977. She is
also a freelance writer, a journalist for 'Neue Z�rcher Zeitung' and
'Die Zeit', and a translator of Russian, Serbo-Croatian and French
works (including Marina Tsvetayeva, Danilo Kis and Marguerite
Duras). She has published several volumes of short stories,
including 'Die Insel' (1982), 'Miramar' (1986) and 'Steppe' (1990).
After 'Ein Strich durch alles. Neunzig Neunzeiler' (1997) a
second volume of poetry, 'Love after Love. Acht Abges�nge', was
published 2001. 'Von Ketzern und Klassikern' (2003) is a
foray through Russian literature. In 2006, she published her lectures
of her time as the Visting Chamisso Professor of Poetry under the title
'Zur Sprache gehen' as well as her collection of poems 'Garten, Züge'.
Rakusa has been awarded a number of scholarships and has won several
prizes, including the 'Petrarca Prize' for her translation of Marina
Tsvetayeva�s works in 1991, the 'Leipzig Book Prize for European
Understanding' in 1998, the 'Schiller-Preis der Z�rcher Kantonalbank'
in 1998, and the Prize of the International Literature Festival in
Vilencia, Slovenia in 2006. She is also a member of the German Academy
of Language nd Poetry in Darmstadt. Ilma Rakusa lives in
Zurich and Berlin.
� international literature festival berlin
Ilma Rakusa online: www.ilmarakusa.info | 
