Iztok Osojnik

Iztok Osojnik (born 27 July 1951) is a Slovene poet and essayist. Between 1997 and 2004 he was the director of the Vilenica International Literary Festival organized by the Slovene Writers' Association.

Osojnik was born in Ljubljana in 1951. He studied Comparative literature at the University of Ljubljana under the supervision of the literary historian and philosopher Dušan Pirjevec. In his college years he collaborated with the poet Jure Detela and sociologist Iztok Saksida in publishing their Podrealistični manifest (The Sub-realist Manifesto) in 1979 and later participated in the avantgarde group called Pisarna Aleph (Aleph Office). Between 1980 and 1982 he continued his postgraduate studies at the Kansai Gaidai University in Osaka, Japan. In 2000 he was the fellow of Cambridge Seminar on Contemporary English Writers and in 2001 the fellow of Goethe Institut in Berlin. Between 2002 and 2003 he visited the USA on a Fulbright Fellowship.

He has published several collections of poetry. In 1996 he received the Jenko Award for his poetry collection Klesani kamni (Carved Stones). His poems have been translated into English, German, French, Italian, Croatian, Hungarian, Hebrew, Macedonian, Malay, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese and Romanian.

He lives and works in Ljubljana.