Alojz Rebula was born on June 21, 1924, and died on October 23, 2018.
He was a Slovene writer, playwright, essayist, and translator.
He was a prominent member of the Slovene minority in Italy.
Alojz Rebula resided and worked in Villa Opicina in the Province of Trieste, Italy.
Rebula was a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Rebula attended Italian-language schools, where he became acquainted with Italian culture and literature.
Rebula went to the gymnasium of Gorizia and later the lyceum in Udine, which he graduated from in 1944.
Rebula relocated to Yugoslavia, After the end of World War II, .
Rebula studied classical philology at the University in Ljubljana, from where he graduated in 1949. In 1951, he moved back to Italy because of the pressures of the Communist regime.
Alojz Rebula was banned from entering Yugoslavia because of his political opposition to the Communist system, in 1956.
During 1960 he received his PhD from the University of Rome with the thesis Dante’s Divine Comedy in Slovene Translations.
During that same year the officials prohibited him from entering Yugoslavia for a second time, because he had publicly protested in Trieste newspapers against the suppression of the publication of the novel Listina (The Document) by Edvard Kocbek in Slovenia.
During the 1960s he settled in Trieste, where he worked as a teacher of Latin and Ancient Greek at secondary schools with Slovene as the language of instruction.
Alojz Rebula also engaged in cultural work with the local Slovene community.
He published numerous collections of essays, diaries, novels, plays, short prose, and other works that have been translated into a number of foreign languages.
The popular Slovene author and intellectual Andrej Capuder stated that Rebula’s work “is the best we Slovenes can show to the world today.” To best describe Rebula are antiquity, Christianity and Slovenehood or, as he stated himself: “Ancestral Karst ordered two tyrannical loves: on an ancient raft you shall cleave the Slovene sea!”
He was awarded several prizes for his writing.
During 1969 Alojz Rebula received the Prešeren Fund Award, the so-called “small” Prešeren award, for the novel V Sibilnem vetru (In Sybil’s Wind).
During 1995, Rebula received the Prešeren Award, the highest Slovenian prize for cultural achievements, for artistic achievement for his life’s work.
During 1997 Alojz Rebula was awarded the Acerbi Prize for his novel In Sybil’s Wind in the Italian translation, and in 2005 the Kresnik Award for A Nocturne for the Littoral, which the jury voted the best Slovene novel of the year.
Alojz Rebula passed away at 94 years old.