Irena Svetek – literary evening with the queen of psychological crime novels

Irena Svetek, one of Slovenia's most successful writers, known as the queen of psychological crime novels, will present her new novel Tam, kjer plešejo tulipani (Where Tulips Dance) at the Koper Library's City Reading Room. Alenka Penjak will be in conversation with Irena Svetek.Irena Svetek (1975) is a doctoral student at the Department of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana. She wrote her literary debut, the novel Od blizu (Up Close), in 2004 and received an award for the best debut at the Slovenian Book Fair. This was followed by the novels Sedmi val (The Seventh Wave, 2011) and Zaspi, mala moja, zaspi (Sleep, My Little One, Sleep, 2014), after which she began a period of psychological crime novels that attracted readers like a magnet. The first was Rdeča kapica (Little Red Riding Hood, 2021), followed by Beli volk (The White Wolf, 2022), and the trilogy was concluded with Črni princ (The Black Prince, 2023).In the family novel Tam, kjer plešejo tulipani (Where the Tulips Dance), Irena Svetek intertwines her personal family history with a broader social and historical context. This extensive work begins in 1912 in the town of Vršac on the Serbian-Romanian border and focuses on a grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter, each of whom faces turbulent social and political changes (World War I and II, the tense atmosphere in interwar and postwar Yugoslavia) as well as personal challenges, within which a moving love story unfolds, representing the central motif of this poignant and emotional family portrait.