The multilingual poet Natalija Milovanović has firmly established her poetics with her second book of poems, Tuja mehkoba (Foreign Softness), which won the Veronika Prize for the best poetry collection in Slovenia of 2025. Talking about language and identity, she explains that a poem usually arrives to her in Slovenian, even though she was born in Niš at the height of the Yugoslav wars. It is mostly the subject that decides the language: the more intimate the topic, the more likely it is to be written in her native tongue. Her poems explore identity with a refined, unhurried sensibility, a reflexive attention to language and a contemplative response to the world. Such writing is emerging as the epitome of a poetics of post-national borders, one that transgresses and travels between languages and countries seamlessly. Without ever losing sight of a sense of belonging, these poems decipher the unwritten rulebook of things held to be self-evident, but that nevertheless change without fail every time a border is crossed.

Natalija Milovanović (1995) is a poet and translator with a completed master’s degree in translation studies. She writes in Slovenian and Serbian. Her debut collection Samoumevno (2021) won the award for best literary debut at the Slovenian Book Fair; her second, Tuja mehkoba (2025), received the Veronika Award and was shortlisted for the Jenko Award. Both appeared in 10 Books from Slovenia. She translates poetry and prose between Serbian and Slovenian, and since 2025 has been executive producer of the Pranger festival. Her poems have been translated into eight languages.