Blackberry Heaven / Litterae Slovenicae (ePub)

NataSa Kramberger, a writer, ecological farmer and herbalist, was born in 1983 and spent her childhood in the village of Jurovski Dol in northeastern Slovenia. She graduated from the Department of Communication Science at the Faculty of Social Sciences in Ljubljana and continued her studies in Utrecht as well as in Berlin. Her debut novel Nebesa v robidah (Blackberry Heaven, 2007) gained the attention of the critics and was nominated for the Kresnik Award for the best Slovenian novel. It also won the 2010 European Union Prize for Literature. She went on to publish a novel in rhyme, Kaki vojaki (Khaki Soldiers, 2011); a collection of newspaper and magazine columns in which she wrote about her life in Berlin, Brez zidu (Without a Wall, 2014); the poems and fiction notes Tujcice (Catkins, 2014); and the novel Primerljivi hektarji (Comparable Hectares, 2017), which is a partly autobiographical work in which the narrator, after having lived in Berlin, returns to a small Slovenian village and becomes an ecological farmer. Kramberger often mixes the rural and the urban in her work, the realism of the contemporary with the mythologized past, while combining the genres of journalism, essays, and belles-lettres. She spends her summers in the village of Jurovski Dol, where she founded the eco-collective "Zelena centrala" (Green Central) with which she promotes the principles of ecology, art, and social inclusion. She spends her winters in Berlin, where she runs the Slovenian-German cultural association Periskop.