Paula Gruden

Who was Paula Gruden?

Paula Gruden or Pavla Gruden was an Australian poet, translator, and editor of Slovene descent.

Gruden was born in Ljubljana, at the time a town in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. During the Second World War she was transported to Germany for forced labor, and then she worked in Trieste as a secretary and translator for the Allied military administration. Since 1948, she lived and worked as a writer in Sydney, Australia. She founded the literary magazine Svobodni razgovori in 1982 and served as its editor.

Gruden wrote in both English and her native Slovene. Gruden also translated from Slovene and Serbo-Croatian. She is known among the Slovene community and in Australian literary circles as a prolific writer of the haiku poetic form. She was member of the Slovene Writers' Association.

Gruden has been included into several anthologies, among them Antologija slovenskih pesnic, Zbornik avstralskih slovencev, Album slovenskih književnikov, Australian Made: A Multicultural Reader, and Fragments from Slovene Literature: An Anthology of Slovene Literature.