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Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW)

Irena Brežná

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Irena Brežná, 2014 (Wikimedia Commons/Goesseln)

Born in 1950 in what was then Czechoslovakia, Irena Brežná grew up in Trenćín. In 1968, she arrived with her parents in Switzerland, where she embarked on a lic.phil degree in Psychology, Philosophy and Slavic Studies at the University of Basle in 1975. The first-generation Swiss author is a professional translator and interpreter in addition to working as a journalist and activist. She undertook psychological research in institutes in Munich and Basle and has published extensively in prestigious German-language publications such as Die Zeit, Der Tages-Anzeiger, Die Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Die Basler Zeitung and Die Süddeutsche Zeitung. During the Cold War, she worked as a Swiss radio correspondent for both the BBC and Deutsche Welle, as well as for the Slovakian Free Europe radio station. In the 1970s and 1980s, she was an active campaigner and coordinator for Amnesty International. More recently, she has won significant acclaim for her literary oeuvre, notably winning the Swiss Federal Prize for Literature in acknowledgement of her outstanding 2012 text Die undankbare Fremde (The Thankless Stranger, 2012).

Brežná has said that ‘again and again she tackles the themes of foreignness and injustice and grapples with alienation and transgression and she lives transculturally as a matter of course’ (cited on the author’s website). This statement is certainly reflected in her literary output to date. Her 1989 children’s book Biro & Barbara (Biro and Barbara, 1989), co-authored with francophone Guinean writer Alpha Oumar Barry, attempts a poetic confrontation with racism. Alienation and physicality are explored in her 1989 text Die Schuppenhaut (Scaly Skin), which was republished after drastic reworking by Edition-Ebersbah in 2010. The themes of being outside, borders and transitions are recurring motifs in her writing.

After Biro & Barbara, Brežná published a series of texts which are more journalistic in tone, reporting on her own experience as a journalist, bringing a personal angle to fact-finding missions with people in conflicted regions of Africa and Eastern Europe. Her 2008 autofictional text die Beste aller Welten (The Best of All Worlds, 2008) throws a critical light on the author’s childhood upbringing beyond the Iron Curtain and reached the SWR bestseller list at the time. Another autobiographically infected 2012 text, die undankbare Fremde, explores the author’s life after immigrating to Switzerland; it chronicles the struggles and challenges faced by the character in her attempt to adapt to a Swiss model of existence. A strong awareness of the importance of language to personal experience imbues Brežná’s writing with a layered perspective that is also recognizable in the work of authors like Emine Sevgi Oždamar, alongside whom she has previously been read. Brežná’s writing is also distinct in its strident critique of the status quo, for example in die undankbare Fremde. Here she both queries Swiss societal norms and argues against their uncritical acceptance. Through this stance she very much positions herself within a wider Swiss creative tradition of critical patriotism.

Compiled by Jonny Johnston (Dublin)