Marjan Rožanc

Who was Marjan Rožanc?

Marjan Rožanc was a Slovenian author, playwright and journalist. He is mostly known for his essays, and is considered one of the foremost essayists in the Slovene language, along with Ivan Cankar, Jože Javoršek and Drago Jančar, and as a great master of style.

He was born in a working-class suborb of Polje in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He attended high school during World War Two, when the Province of Ljubljana was occupied by Italian troops. After the war, he shortly worked as a manual worker. In 1950, he was drafted in the Yugoslav People's Army, serving in Požarevac, Serbia. Because of his non-comformist attitudes, he was accused of "hostile propaganda" against the Communist regime, and sentenced to three and a half years in prison. He was released in 1955, and returned to Slovenia.

He settled in Maribor, where he started a career as a journalist. In the early 1950s, he moved back to Ljubljana, where he took up a career as a freelance writer and columnist. He became involved in a circle of young intellectuals known as the Critical generation. He also became a close friend of the Christian Socialist poet Edvard Kocbek and the existentialist playwright Dominik Smole.