Poets

Ivan Štrpka was born on June 30, 1944, in Hlohovec, Slovak Republic. He worked for two years as a researcher in the field of geodesy. He studied Spanish and Slovak language and literature at the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University in Bratislava.
In the 1960s, together with poets Ivan Laučík and Peter Repka, he founded the individualist poetry group The Lonely Runners. Their manifesto, The Return of the Angels, was banned. It addressed the freedom of thought, life, and creativity, the responsibility of the individual, and the rejection of communist dictatorship and censorship. The group formed its own writing style and its own system of values.
During the Velvet Revolution in 1989, he was a co-founder and activist of the movement Public Against Violence. He worked as editor-in-chief of the renewed legendary weekly Cultural Life. From 1970, he was an editor at the publishing house Slovenský spisovateľ (Slovak Writer), and from 1971 to 1973 he worked at Tatran publishing house. He later worked as a dramaturge for children and youth at Slovak Television in Bratislava. In the second half of the 1980s, he served as editor-in-chief of several literary journals.
He made his debut in 1969 with the book The Brief Childhood of Spearmen. After the publication of Tristan Is Rambling in 1971, he was banned from publishing for ten years. Later, he published a series of poetry collections, three books of essays, and the novel The Hostage.
In addition, he wrote lyrics for twelve albums by the unique rock composer and singer Dežo Ursiny.
His works have been translated into several foreign languages. He himself translates from Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, and Arabic.
He has received numerous literary awards.
He lives in Slovakia, in Bratislava and elsewhere.

Poetry books:

The Brief Childhood of the Spearmen (1969, 1999)
Tristan Is Rambling (1971)
Now and Other Islands (1981)
Before the Change (1982)
News from the Apples (1985), in Serbian: 2008
Everything Is in the Shell (Notes from the Journey) (1989)
Beautiful Naked World (1990)
Rovinj, Southwest. My Mother’s Death (1995, 2023), in Portuguese: 1999, in Romanian: 2000, in Polish: 2011
Interludes. Headless Dolls (1997, 2019), in German: 1995
Master Mu and the Female Voices (1997)
Voices and Other Poems (2001)
25 Poems (2003)
Silent Hand. Ten Elegies (2006), in Polish: 2009, in Italian: 2014
The Great Breath: Psychopolis, Thin Ice (2009)
Baby: A Crisis (2011)
Fragment (of the Chivalric) Forest (2016), in French: 2019, in Polish: 2020, in English: 2025
Where the Coat Is, There Is the Wind (2018)
The Stepping of Hermes (2022)
Gestures, Facts, First Gliders (2025)
Collected works in three volumes from the first twelve poetry collections:
Poems I (2008), Poems II (2013), Poems III (2014)
Essay collections:
The Cramp of the Open Palm and Other Essays (1995)
At the Very Edge (of Writing) (2006)
The Cramp of the Open Palm Continues (2025)