Irena Brežná foto 1

Irena Brežná

26. 2. 1950
Bratislava
Genre:
essay, general fiction, journalism, other, ya and children's books

Curriculum vitae

A Slovak-Swiss writer and journalist. Her life and her writing are marked by her experience of emigrating from Czechoslovakia to Switzerland in 1968. This watershed experience forms the bedrock of her newspaper articles, essays and prose works as well as her work as a psychologist, translator and interpreter. She read Slavonic Studies, Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Basel. She was actively engaged in work for Amnesty International, she worked as a psychologist and interpreter for refugees. She has carried out and supported various humanitarian projects, for example in Guinea and in Chechnya. In Slovakia she cooperates with the feminist educational and publishing project Aspekt, which she has supported ever since its foundation. For the most part she writes in German and she has received a number of awards for her journalistic and literary texts. She is a regular contributor to several Swiss and German newspapers and magazines, since 2014 she regularly writes for Slovak newspaper SME. Her first novel published in Slovakia was Psoriáza, moja láska (Psoriasis, My Love, 1992) and after a longish interval she published an extensive selection of texts in 2005 under the title of Tekutý fetiš (Liquid Fetish). In the novel Na slepačích krídlach (On Chicken Wings, 2007) the author returns to her childhood in Czechoslovakia. Her latest novel Nevďačná cudzin(k)a (Ungrateful Foreigner, 2015) has met with success both at home and abroad; it has won the prize of the Swiss Confederation, Dominik Tatarka Award and was nominated for the prestigious literary prize Anasoft litera 2016. The German original was translated excerpt of Slovak into French, Italian, Russian, Macedonian, Dutch and Swedish language.