English · profile for international readers
Sonja Koranter, Slovenian poet and writer
A short profile in English. The rest of this website is in Slovenian; the menu labels are Poetry, Haiku, Essays, Novels and stories, Crime fiction, Fairy tales, Awards, Reviews and Bibliography.
Who she is
Sonja Koranter is a Slovenian poet and writer. She has been publishing since 1981, when her first three poetry collections, Pesmi (Poems), Požirek iz skledastih časov and Senhaba, appeared in her own imprint in Jesenice, Slovenia. Her personal bibliography in COBISS.SI, the Slovenian national library system, lists 201 records for the years 1980 to 2026, from those first self-published booklets to the 2026 e-book edition of her novel Babilon XYZ.
Forty-five years of writing cover poetry, haiku, essays, short stories, novels, crime fiction and twenty-six books for children and young readers. She writes mostly in Slovenian and, since the 1990s, also in English. She has worked with Radio Slovenija, where many of her poems were broadcast.
Poetry, prose and books for children
Poetry is the centre of her work. After the self-published collections of the 1980s and 1990s came Zlatoličje (Društvo 2000, 2000), Pesniški venec and Zemljekrog (2002), the bilingual Minljivost (2003), Odsončje (KATR, 2008) and Orfejeve solze (Orpheus's Tears, Kulturni center Maribor, 2022). In December 2011 Zemljekrog was accepted by the Poetry Library at London's Southbank Centre, which collects translated poetry and promotes the reading of poems.
Her crime fiction began with Sladek strup (Sweet Poison, Ved, 2007) and continued with Trinajsti srebrnik and Sonata za Cezarja in diamante (KATR, 2009), Omamni vonj denarja (2012), Ples demonov (2018), Hobotnica (The Octopus, 2020), Divja raca (The Wild Duck, 2023) and Babilon XYZ (2025). Her novels include Nezgodba o Marí 'Unjatu (2007), Boginja rdeče lune (Goddess of the Red Moon, Ekslibris, 2010) and Začaran vrt (The Enchanted Garden, 2013). Between 2012 and 2017 the Ljubljana publisher Alba 2000 brought out twenty-one of her books for children and teenagers, and Kulturni center Maribor has published her picture books and a fantasy novel for young readers since 2020.
International recognition
In the United States her poems appeared in Verses, the literary magazine of Cader Publishing in Michigan: The Living Force in 2000, when she was named winner of the month for April 2000, and Rain, The Tree of Wishes, You and I and When Angels Fall to Sleep in 2002, when the magazine presented her as a featured international poet. Poetry.com published Home of the Birds, Smile, The Tiny Grain and You and I (2002) on a CD and in an anthology. The Iowa magazine 100 Words printed five of her short bilingual pieces between 1996 and 1998, and she reached the final of an Iliad Press competition. In Bosnia and Herzegovina the magazine Sarajevske sveske published poems from her collection Jutro ima zelene oči (The Morning Has Green Eyes). One of her haiku was selected from more than a thousand entries at the First Annual Cherry Blossom Festival in Vancouver.
Since April 2026 she has entered every monthly round of the Writory International Poetry Contest, 22 poems in five rounds, and finished in the published top ten each time. In July 2026 her poem Prostor (Space) placed second. In August 2026 Moj ded (My Grandfather) was the highest-placed poem from Slovenia and received the National Honour for Slovenia. Every placement and certificate can be checked on her verified Writory portfolio and on her Unheard Voices page.
Poems in English
Two poems in her own English, Hymn to the Earth and Prophecy, are published on this site. Prophecy placed sixth in the April 2026 round of the Writory contest.
New collection: Pastirji tišine (The Shepherds of Silence)
Pastirji tišine (The Shepherds of Silence) is her newest poetry collection, published in 2026. The back cover describes it as poetry of the threshold: between light and darkness, between the body and silence.
On 2 September 2026 the Slovenian literary magazine eRast published a review by Manja Žugman. She reads the collection as a book about transience, violence, nature, memory and loneliness, but also about eternity and the living word; nature appears in it as a moral witness, and the poem keeps the trace of human life after everything else is gone. The full review, in Slovenian, is on this page.
Contact
For rights, readings and translation enquiries: sonja.koranter@telemach.net. Slovenian pages: About the author, Awards, Bibliography (COBISS, 201 records).