Ilma Rakusa
Photo reproduced by courtesy of Harald Ortlieb of Unternehmens.TV GmbH, Hamburg.
Shearsman Titles
A Farewell to Everything
About the author
Ilma Rakusa was born in 1946 in Rimavská Sobota, Slovakia, to a Hungarian mother and a Slovenian father, and spent her childhood in Budapest, Ljubljana and Trieste. From 1965-1971 she studied Slavic Languages & Literature, and Romance Languages & Literature in Zürich, Paris and St Petersburg, and in 1971 was awarded a doctorate for her dissertation on the 'Theme of Loneliness in Russian Literature', later published by Herbert Lang Verlag, (Berne, 1973).
Since 1977 she has been a Lecturer at the University of Zürich, and also a freelance writer, translator and journalist (for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Die Zeit etc). She lives in Zürich.
Ilma Rakusa is the author of several collections of poetry and prose – her prose volume Steppe, translated by Solveig Emerson, is also available in English translation (from Burning Deck, Providence, 1997) – and is a busy translator from French, Russian, Serbo-Croat and Hungarian, the authors including Marguerite Duras, Marina Tsvetaeva, Alexei Remizov, Danilo Kiš, Imre Kertész and Péter Nádas.