Sonja Koranter: Forty-Five Years of Poems, Read Blind
She self-published her first poems in Jesenice in 1981. In 2026, with two hundred records in the national bibliography behind her, she entered a blind-judged international contest and placed second. A profile of Sonja Koranter and what her record shows.
In 1981 a young woman in Jesenice, a steel town under the Karavanke mountains, printed her first poems herself. There was no publisher and no launch. The pamphlet went into the Slovenian national bibliography with a note that still reads like a shrug: samozaložba, self-published. Forty-five years later that bibliography runs to two hundred records, and the same writer has just placed second in an international poetry round judged by people who did not know her name.
This is a short profile of Sonja Koranter, and of what a long career looks like when it is finally laid out as a record.
The round she did not need to enter
By the spring of 2026 Sonja Koranter had nothing to prove. She had published poetry, haiku, essays, fairy tales, novels and a shelf of crime fiction. Her poems had been broadcast on Radio Slovenija's Ars programme and printed in Delo, Sodobnost, Dialogi and Sarajevske sveske. In 2011 the Poetry Library at London's Southbank Centre had taken her collection Zemljekrog into its holdings of translated verse.
She entered the Writory International Poetry Contest anyway, in April 2026, with two poems written in English, Prayer to the Earth and Prophecy. They placed sixth. In May she sent five poems and finished fourth. In June a five-poem cycle, Visoke njive, came ninth. Then in July her Slovenian poem PROSTOR, which means Space, took second place in a field of poets from more than twenty countries, read blind against the same five criteria as everyone else.
In August she sent five poems about the grandparents who raised her. One of them, MOJ DED (My Grandfather), was the highest-scoring poem from Slovenia that month and earned the country's National Honour.
What the record shows
Every entry, place and certificate sits on her Writory portfolio, each with a verify page. Read as a list it is plain:
- Five rounds entered, April to August 2026, 22 poems.
- Five top-ten finishes in five rounds.
- Second place, July 2026, for PROSTOR (Space).
- National Honour, Slovenia, August 2026, for MOJ DED.
- Seasoned Quill: five consecutive rounds without a gap.
What the list cannot show is the temperament behind it. She entered every month, in two languages, with new work each time, and she did it under a system that hides the poet's name from the reader. A writer with a national bibliography chose to be judged like a first-time entrant. That is not a small thing to do.
A house with many rooms
Readers who meet her through the contest see one room. Her crime novels, Hobotnica, Divja raca, Babilon XYZ, Sladek strup, Trinajsti srebrnik, have their own following and their own reviews in the Slovenian press. Her fairy tales, more than twenty of them, are read to children. Her haiku appear in the Samobor and Ludbreg anthologies. In English she has been published in Verses, where she was the winner of the month in April 2000, and in 100 Words in Iowa.
The through-line, across all of it, is a countryside childhood remembered without sentiment: a grandmother's apron with seven pockets, a clock covered with linen at night so the goblins in the beams would fall quiet, a grandfather recognised only by his hat. Those images run from the 1980s pamphlets to the poems she sent us this August.
The Shepherds of Silence
Her 2026 collection is called Pastirji tišine, The Shepherds of Silence. Its first page thanks the earth, the water, the wind and time for teaching her patience, and thanks "the word that stayed when everything else had gone."
"A collection about transience, violence, nature, memory and loneliness, but also about the eternity and the liveliness of the word. Although the world the poet describes is often dark, the poetry itself proves that life goes on."
Manja Žugman, reviewing the book in the journal eRast, 2 September 2026
The full review, in Slovenian, is on her website, alongside the five August poems.
Why we publish records like this
Writory keeps a public record for every writer for the same reason a library keeps a catalogue: so that what happened can be checked by anyone, years later, without taking anybody's word for it. Sonja Koranter's page is what that record looks like after a full season. Nothing on it was written by her about herself. It is the contests she entered, the poems that were read, the places she earned and the certificates that were issued, with the judging criteria published beside them.
Read her poems and her story at sonjakoranter.com, see the verified record on her Writory portfolio, and find more writers on record in the Writory Register.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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