Drago Jančar

As a teenager, he began writing for the 'Mladina’, a current affairs left-wing magazine.

Jančar studied law in his hometown Maribor .While attending college in the late 1960s, he was the chief editor of student journal 'Katedra’.

Drago Jančar worked for the daily newspaper 'Vecer.' In 1974, he was arrested for distributing a pamphlet decrying Marshal Tito's forces' role in the massacre of World War II prisoners in May 1945.

Jancar was sentenced to a year in prison in 1975. After three months, he was released and immediately called to military service in southern Serbia. He had a tough time in his military and was harassed by his superiors.

After completing his stint with the military, Drago Jančar joined back the newspaper ‘Vecer’, but was allowed to perform only administrative work. As a result, he decided to relocate to Ljubljana.

His relocation to Ljubljana allowed him to befriend influential artists and intellectuals critical of the Communist regime in Yugoslavia. He counts Edvard Kocbek, the prominent poet whose political stances after World War II made him controversial in Slovenian politics, and Alenka Puhar, a leading proponent of psychohistory, as profound influences on his thoughts and actions.

From 1978 to 1980, he worked as a screenwriter in the film studio, Viba Film. Censorship of his work led him to quit his job as at Viba Film.

His essay 'Short Report From A City Long Besieged' compared the 1991–2001 Yugoslavian Wars between Serbs and Albanians.

In his essay 'Xenos and Xenophobia', published in the year 2000, he accused the Slovenian liberal media of promoting anti-Catholicism and xenophobia.

In 2011, Michael Biggins translated Jančar's 1978 novel 'The Galley Slave' into English. The novel describes a picaresque protagonist struggling to live in the Slovenian part of the world in the late Middle Ages era, complete with witch hunts, superstitions, and the plague.