Versopolis Podcast #40: Writing From the Edge of Empire

‘Human life is not more interesting or worthwhile because it occurs in the centers of capitalism.’ That’s the tagline of Peripheries, the online journal co-run by Katja Perat, who joined us for the 40th edition of the Versopolis Podcast. Katja’s early poetry collections, which earned her a cult following, were written against the backdrop of the 2008 global financial crisis and captured a specific moment: Slovenia drifting into neoliberalism under the cover of liberal democracy. Her relationship with poetry at the time was, she says, fraught, shaped by a tendency to hyper-intellectualize rather than feel.

After earning her PhD in 2022 into a brutal humanities job market, she took a position teaching English at a community college in northern Alaska, the northernmost in North America. The move tied together her longstanding fascination with the Far North and her commitment to minor languages: teaching in a community where Iñupiaq is spoken, she draws a quiet parallel to her grandmother’s work with Slovene as a minority language. ‘There’s an untapped wealth of literary inspiration in these spaces where the rural collides with the urban,’ Katja says, ‘the literary markets just isn’t as interested in covering peripheral knowledge. And I think, just from an epistemological perspective, that’s a huge loss.’

Katja Perat is a Slovenian poet, novelist, essayist and journalist whose work spans multiple literary forms and languages. She published her first poems in 2007 in the Slovene literary magazine Literatura and the bilingual Slovenian-Bosnian magazine Dignimo pero/Dvignimo pero. Her debut poetry collection, The Best Have Fallen (Najboljši so padli, 2011), received the Best Debut Award and the Kritiško sito Award from the Slovenian Literary Critics’ Association. Her second collection, Value-Added Tax (Davek na dodano vrednost, 2014), was nominated for both the Jenko Award and the Veronika Award. That same year, her work appeared alongside Eileen Myles in Fear of Language, the third issue of Sternberg Press’s Poetic Series. 

Her novel The Masochist (Mazohistka), translated into English by Michael Biggins and published by Istros Books in 2020, has taken on an international life of its own in translation, earning a nomination for the Dublin Literary Award. In 2019, she published the essay collection Make America Graspable Again. A Slovene immigrant and minor language speaker, Perat holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis. As a scholar, author and teacher, she explores the relationship between complexity and accessibility, and brings her transcultural, multilingual background to the writing classroom.