Veronika Simoniti - A linguistic experimentalist in the tradition of Julio Cortazar, Simoniti populates her tales with homeless and nomadic characters struggling to fashion or to maintain their identities as they cross physical and linguistic borders

Veronika Simoniti, Mere Chances, Trans. by Nada Groselj, Dalkey Archive Press, 2018.


Mere Chances collects some of Veronika Simoniti's most singular and strange stories. A linguistic experimentalist in the tradition of Julio Cortazar, Simoniti populates her tales with homeless and nomadic characters struggling to fashion or to maintain their identities as they cross physical and linguistic borders. Whether compelled to communicate in codes not their own or grappling with the loss of language itself, her characters’ struggles to forge stable identities point to the way human language, while fundamental to the formation of the self, is often an unreliable and imperfect tool.








Born in 1967, Veronika Simoniti began her career as an author of children’s books, first publishing her work on Radio Slovenia. Her first story collection, Zasukane Storije (Twisted Stories) received Slovenia’s Best First Book of the Year in 2005. She published her second collection, Hudicev jezik (The Devil’s Tongue), in 2011, and her first novel, Kameno seme (The Stone Seed) in 2014. For her story “Sixty Percent,” she received the Women’s Council of Trieste Prize in 2013. Her work has appeared in numerous international anthologies and has been translated into English, German, Croatian, Serbian, Italian, Hungarian, and Czech.