On Sunday December 4th, 2011, at the Historical Caffé San Marco of Trieste, 17.00, the PEN Trieste Centre will award its Literary Prize - dedicated to its former President Claudio H. Martelli - to Prof. Ciril Zlobec as acknowledgment of his literary merits and of his work towards the comprehension between Italia and Slovenia.
Prof. Ciril Zlobec, born in 1925 in Ponivke, is well known as a translator, especially from Italian (Dante Alighieri, Leopardi, Ungaretti and others) and Serbo-Croatian (Popa, Mihalic).
He is known especially as a poet who writes lyrical, emotional songs, but he is also a novelist and an essayist. For his literary work he has received several awards, including the Tomšičeva (1956), Župančič (1976) and Prešeren (1982) Prizes. Since 1985 he is a Member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and he is also a corresponding Member of the Croatian Academy.
In 1990 – after a long political engagement - he became a member of the Federal Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia. He is a Grand Officer of the Order of the Stella della Solidarietà of Italy.
The PEN Trieste Prize has been awarded since 2006 to Claudio Magris, Boris Pahor, Renzo Rosso and to Hugo Beccacece / Tonko Maroevic, in the frame of the International Literary Prize Trieste Scritture di Frontiera “Umberto Saba” organized by Altamarea, Trieste.
In the photo of June 2010 from left: Marko Kravos, Claudio H. Martelli, Ciril Zlobec, Juan Octavio Prenz, Roberta Ferrazza, Antonio Della Rocca, Claudio Grisancich, Barbara Simoniti.
