Florjan Lipuš was born in 1937 in Lobnik near Bad Eisenkappel in the Austrian State of Carinthia. He went to the Upper Secondary School for the Humanities at the Plešivec/Tanzenberg Diocesan Seminary, which he graduated from in 1958. Afterwards, he studied Theology in Klagenfurt and later graduated from teachers’ college. He taught at bilingual primary-and-lower-secondary schools in Remšenik, Lepena, and Šentlipš near Ženek, until retiring in 1998. Florjan Lipuš is one of the main Slovene writers of prose fiction who also writes essays and dramatic texts. He published and edited the Mladje literary journal for 20 years (1960-1981). He was appointed Correspondent Member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences (SAZU) in 1985 and has also been a member of the Slovene Writers’ Association for a number of years. He lives with his family in Sele near Žitara vas.
- Florjan Lipuš
- English
Tip!
With its echoes of fellow Austrian novelist Robert Musil’s novella Young Törless, and of Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, Florjan Lipuš’s Young Tjaž, first published in 1972, helped moved the critique of Germanic Europe’s fundamental social conformity into the postwar age. But Lipuš, a member of the Slovene ethnic minority indigenous to Austria’s southernmost province of Carinthia, wrote his novel in Slovene and aimed it not just at Austrian society’s hidebound clericalism, but also at its intolerance of the ethnic other in its midst. When Austrian novelist and fellow Carinthian Peter Handke resolved in the late 1970s to explore his Slovene roots, the first book he picked up was Lipuš’s Young Tjaž, which served as his Badeker through the Slovene language, and which he faithfully translated into German and published in 1981.
Novel