Writer and playwright

Saša Vuga was born on 8 February 1930 in Most na Soči, a town in the Soča Valley in the Western part of  Slovenia.  He earned a BA in Slovenian studies and Comparative Literature, and was a writer, playwright, retired editor of the Drama Section of the Slovenian National Television, well known for his baroque narration style in which he explored the possibilities of the Slovenian language.   

As all the population of the region, he too was inherently bicultural and forced into bilingualism by the Italian Fascism; he was first educated in local Italian schools. Not until he was seventeen did he have the opportunity to study in Slovenian for the first time. Due to the post war political situation in the region he continued his high school studies in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana where he met a number of his literary friends, poets Kajetan Kovič, Janez Menart, Dane Zajc and Ciril Zlobec whom he always considered pivotal linguistic and cultural influences.  The entire group collaborated on the bulletin Mi mladi (We, the Youth) published by the boarding house they resided in. After a month and a half he returned to Šempeter pri Gorici where he graduated from high school in 1949. In the autumn of the same year he started studying at the Ljubljana Faculty of Arts and graduated in 1956 with a thesis entitled: Slovenska proza med obema vojnama o prvi vojni (Interwar Slovenian Prose on World War I). He chose this topic due to his correspondence with writer Prežihov Voranc who made Vuga’s father a protagonist of his novel Požganica.

In 1949, due to the unfavourable post-war financial circumstances of his family, Vuga also began a career as a speaker in Italian language at the National Radio in Ljubljana. He was not yet fluent in Slovenian and needed three years of thorough studies; his acceptance into the Slovenian section of the National Radio in 1952 was an important career achievement for him. 

Around this time, Vuga became familiar with the new medium, television, and he frequently visited the central Italian TV station in Milan. He was offered the post of Editor of Drama Section at the Slovenian National Television (in creation) in 1962. He conceptualised a programming scheme to which the said drama section has adhered to since. He particularly insisted that Slovenian works be included in the program scheme (originals, adaptations, live transmissions of original Slovenian drama classics). To encourage authors who viewed the new medium with great caution (the French have named this phenomenon the Rimbaud complex, a complex felt by authors, humanists, who found the new medium technically flawed), he penned a handbook for writing TV plays in accordance with the postulates of new drama writing. In the period without original Slovenian plays being created, Vuga himself wrote several texts; the compilation of his selected plays Rekviem za heroji(Requiem for Heroes, 1969) is considered the first Slovenian publication of TV literature in book form. In 1975, his TV drama Gorjupa bajta (The Bitter Shanty) was published in book form. After a 40-year career, Vuga retired in 1989, and published a parting selection of his (rewarded) TV dramas titled Stezà do polnoči (Path to Midnight). The plays included in this selection are Silvestrovo črepinj (The New Year’s Eve of the Shards), Povest o belem zajcu (The Story of the White Rabbit), Maistrova najdaljša mariborska noč, 1918 (General Maister’s longest night in Maribor, 1918) and Maronius Pilla (included in 1993).
He lived abroad for several months on two occasions. He studied the Renaissance and Dante’s lexis at the University for Foreigners in Perugia on a Italian Government scholarship. Later, he studied the established mechanisms of the creation of drama programmes in Paris, at the central French TV on a Prešeren Fund Scholarship.  
His literary beginnings go back to the first post-war years in Gorizia with his texts being published in the local literary reviews Glas mladih (Voice of the Youth) and Soški glas (The Voice of Soča). He continued his literary career in the mentor magazine Mladinska revija (Review of the Youth) and later on in Sodobnost (Contemporaneity), a central literary review to which he contributed until the end of his days. Some of the texts published in this medium were Zlata mrtvaška glavica (Tiny Golden Skull), Mesec gleda na polje (The Moon Overlooking the Field), Ljubila je marjetice (She Loved Daisies). Žalostna obsoška povest (Sad Story from alongside the Soča river, 1952) is one of Vuga’s early dialogue texts turned into a radio play. 
Škorenjček Matevžek (The Baby Boot Matevžek, 1955, reprinted in 1975 and 2000), a children’s story with folk tale elements, was his first published book. It was followed by his first novel Veter nima cest (Wind has no Roads, 1958), conceptualised as an entanglement of petty, romantically inspirational destinies of people living along the Soča riverbanks, burdened by the past of world wars, a selection of macabre, grotesquely humorous novellas Račke po reki plavajo (On the River Swim the Ducks, 1961), his second novella collection Zarjavele medalje (Oxidized Medals, 1966) and second novel –Vseenost (Sameness, 1972). The two historical novels which gained him recognition and established him as the master of Slovenian language and style were a trilogy set in Renaissance Erazem Predjamski(Erasmus of Predjama, 1978, reprinted in 1984) and tetralogy Krtov kralj (The King of Moles, 1987), an epic fresco from the period of Napoleonic invasion of Slovenia. Between these, he published a thoughtful, ironic, generationally critical narrative Testenine bivših bojevnikov (Pasta of the Former Soldiers, 1980). He gained the prestigious Prešeren Award for his novel Opomin k čuječnosti (The Reminder to Vigilance, 1997). Na rožnatem hrbtù faronike (On the Rose-Coloured Back of faronika) was published in 1999 and Sij s kačjih rid (The Shine from Serpentine Windings) in 2003. With his triptychs Kobariško zrcalo (The Mirror from Kobarid, 2007) and Britev: ali Kako ubiti narodnega izdajalca (The Razor: or How to kill a National Traitor, 2010), Vuga introduced a (new) form of narrative expressionist cluster of three segments, joined in a »novelistic triptych«.
Vuga was a member of the Slovenian Writers Association and the Slovenian PEN club. For several years, Vuga acted as president of the publishing council of Lipa Koper Publishing House. He was also a member of the Slovenian-Italian Cultural-Historical Commission (1993–2001). 

Awards: Nagrada vstaje slovenskega naroda (1975), The Prešeren Fund Award (1979), the Prešeren Award (1998), the Bevk Award (2001). He was awarded the Golden Order for Services in the Civillian Field by the President of the Republic of Slovenia in 2010. Saša Vuga was voted Associate SASA Member in 2007 and Full SASA Member in 2013.

References: B. Trekman, Historia inspiratrix vitae: Ob romanu Erazem Predjamski, Sodobnost, 1979; Dr. A. Inkret, Novi spomini na branje, Ljubljana, 1980; Prof. F. Pibernik, Čas romana, Ljubljana, 1983; Dr. František Benhart, Polifona vizija sveta – kakšen je bil, kakšen je in bo and Poezija v prozi, Bralnica, Maribor, 1984; Prof. A. Lah, Vugov Krtov kralj ali blesteča beseda slovenske proze, Sodobnost, 1988; Slovenska književnost, Ljubljana, 1996; Dr. B. Simoniti, Prebesedeni čas. Saša Vuga, Opomin k čuječnosti, Sodobnost, 1997; Enciklopedija Slovenije (14), 2000; Janez Mušič, Veliki album slovenskih književnikov, Ljubljana, 2004.

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Taken from the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Written by Barbara K. Vuga. 2024.