Aleš Šteger: Knjiga teles – book presentation

Tuesday 26 Oct at 7 pm - the presentation of the book Knjiga teles / Book of Bodies by Aleš Šteger. The discussion was hosted by Simona Kopinšek.

Body is finiteness. It makes us safe, touching the ceaseless. Ceaselessly - it is the emergence of language and its self-destruction. It has taken me five years to write the Book of Bodies, although the bodies that we might sometimes inhabit or be related to them have no own language. This body that is me, here, is just a possibility of a body. This is no place, just the direction of loss. It is not the time (there is no time), just a mimicry of transformations of the past. I have been attempting five years to write this book. In my (my?) eyes it combines with the Book of Things (Knjiga reči) to form an entity that can be neither whole nor completable. Each thing is a fragment and no body is the language of a body.
(Aleš Šteger)

Aleš Šteger, a poet and editor, translator, art critic, preface writer and freelance cultural worker was born in Ptuj in 1973.
His debut collection of poetry was Šahovnice ur (1995), which was followed by Kašmir (1997), Protuberance (2002) and Knjiga reči (2005) as well as a poetry selection with a CD Kamen (2005). He also wrote the prose book Včasih je januar sredi poletja (1999), an attempt at combining poetry and prose, documentary, narrative and lyrical elements. It was followed by Berlin (2007). He is the editor of Koda book series at Študentska založba and a translator of fiction and essays, mostly from German, for magazines and books (Gottfried Benn, Michael Donhauser, Peter Huchel, Pablo Neruda and others).

Šteger was the initiator of the international poetry festival in Medana and its artistic director from 1996 to 2004.
His poetry works have been translated and published in over 200 international literary magazines and newspapers.
His books have been translated to Slovakian, Czech, Croatian, Bulgarian and German.
The book Šahovnice was awarded at Slovenian book fair 1995, the collection Kašmir won him the Veronika prize in 1998,a year later he received Petrarch prize as a European writer of younger generation. Aleš Šteger was the recipient of prestigious scholarships of the American foundation Abraham Woursell in 2001 and the Gernan Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2002, and DAAD - Kuenstlerprogramm, 2004.

ACE KIBLA programme is supported by the Ministry of Culture, Municipality of Maribor and The Slovenian Office of Youth. KIBLA is a part of Multimedia Centres Net Slovenia.

The programme has been supported by the Public Agency of the Republic of Slovenia for Book.