Biography

Ivan Potrč (January 1, 1913 – June 12, 1993) was a Slovene writer and playwright. Ivan Potrč was born on January 1, 1913, in a poor peasant family in Štuki near Ptuj, in what was then the Duchy of Styria in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As a teenager living in difficult social circumstances and in the time of the rise of German nationalism, which was seen a threat to the northern regions of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, he became an enthusiastic communist. Due to his political activities he was sentenced to eleven months of prison and excluded from the high school even before he passed his final exit exam. From 1938 to 1941, he was employed as a journalist at the national liberal daily newspaper Večernik in Maribor. In 1941, after the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia and annexed northern Slovenia to the German Reich, Portč was interned to Mathausen concentration camp, from where he returned in 1943 and joined the Yugoslav Partisans. During and after World War II he worked as editor and journalist for the newspapers Domovina, Borba, and Ljudska pravica. In 1947, he became the main editor and later the director of the Mladinska knjiga publishing company.