France Bevk

France Bevk (1890-1970) was a Slovene writer, poet and translator who also published under the pseudonym Pavle Sedmak. His life spanned the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Fascist Italian rule and postwar Yugoslavia, and his work reflects the lives of Slovenes in the Littoral under pressure from Italianization. He is best remembered for his novel about a Catholic priest and for his large body of children's literature.

Bevk was born in Zakojca, in the County of Gorizia and Gradisca. He studied in Kranj, Koper and Gorizia, fought on the Eastern Front during the First World War, and afterwards became active in cultural and political life in the Littoral under Italian rule, which brought him prosecution and imprisonment. In 1935 he settled in Ljubljana, where he befriended artists and intellectuals such as Zoran Mušič and Vladimir Bartol.

After the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941 he was imprisoned again; in 1943 he escaped and joined the Partisans. After the war he lived briefly in Trieste before returning to Ljubljana, where he died on his eightieth birthday.

He began writing at sixteen, with poems influenced by Župančič and Maeterlinck, and his work moved towards social realism and resistance to Italianization. He is credited with more than a hundred books. His novel The Vicar Martin Čedermac (1938) is his best known, and its title character still lends his name in Slovene to priests of the Littoral who defended Slovene identity.