Ivana Dobrakovová: Responsibility under the sun
– Slovakia
Ivana Dobrakovová is a poet, writer and translator born in Bratislava in 1982. She graduated from Comenius University in Bratislava in translation and interpretation. Since 2005, she has lived in Torino translating French and Italian literature into Slovak. Her books Toxo (2018), Mothers & Truckers (2019) and Below the Torino Sun (2024) have all been translated into Czech. “I only write if I really believe in my idea,” she says. “I write when I feel that something needs to be recorded, but at the same time I have started to write quite a lot of texts ‘for private use’ and unsuitable for publication. I don’t need to publish a book every year to prove something to myself – I have to think things through, I feel responsible for what I send ‘into the world’.”