Lili Novy

Who was Lili Novy?

Lili Novy née Haumeder was a Slovene poet and translator of poetry. She is considered the first Slovene female lyric poet as well as one of the most important Slovene female poets in general.

She was born in Graz as Lili Haumeder to an ethnic German father and a Slovene mother. She was educated privately and began writing poetry in German. In her mid twenties she began to include herself in the Slovene literary scene and began translating Prešeren's German poems into Slovene and vice versa and also began publishing in literary magazines. She also translated a lot of Goethe into Slovene. Gradually, under the influence of Alojz Gradnik, she began writing her own poetry in Slovene. During her lifetime only one collection of her own poems was published: Temna vrata. After spending an entire life on the move with a husband in the military, Lili Novy eventually settled and died in Ljubljana and her bust marks the house in the centre of the old town where she lived. One of the halls in the Cankar Hall Cultural Centre in Ljubljana is also named after her.

In the 1970s, the essayist Jože Javoršek published a monograph on Novy which led to a positive reassessment of her work.