Mária Ferenčuhová (Slovaquie)
Mária Ferenčuhová studied film screenwriting and dramaturgy and did a postgraduate degree in the history and theory of films at the Film and Television Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts (VŠMU) in Bratislava, and Sciences du Langage at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences sociales in Paris. She lives in Bratislava where she currently works for the Slovak film institute after having taught at the Academy of Performing Arts for nearly 15 years.
A translator from French, she has translated, among others, novels by Michel Houellebecq, Philippe Sollers, Amélie Nothomb, Jean Echenoz, Laurent Binet or Alain Mabanckou, a book of poetry by Nicolas Pesquès, a play by Samuel Beckett and philosophical essays by Paul Virilio, Georges Didi-Huberman, François Jost and Jacques Rancière.
Her first collections of poems are Hidden Subtitles (Skryté titulky, 2003), The Principle of Uncertainty (Princíp neistoty 2008), Endangered Species (Ohrozený druh, 2012). In her fourth poetry collection Immunity (2019) she deals with the topic of a grave illness and the human body subjected to medical procedures becomes a literary canvas, open for dissection, analysis and struggle. The factual style of the writing allows for deep and intimate confrontation. Immunity has won several awards and has been translated into four languages. Black Earth (Černozem) came out in 2020 in Slovakia, and later it was published in Spanish translation. In 2018, Shearsman, an English publishing house, published a selection of her poetry under the title Tidal Events, translated by James Sutherland-Smith.
***
***
