Branka Jurca

Branka Jurca (24 May 1914 – 6 March 1999) was a Slovene writer, principally for children and young adults.Jurca was born in Kopriva in the Karst region of what is now Slovenia in 1914. After the First World War the family moved to Maribor where she grew up. She worked as a teacher until the outbreak of the Second World War when she moved to Ljubljana. She participated in the Slovene Liberation Front but was arrested and sent to Gonars concentration camp and then Ravensbrück concentration camp. After the end of the war she worked as teacher for a while and then as an editor of the children's journal Ciciban. She wrote 35 stories for children, novels and collections of short stories. She died in Ljubljana in 1999.She won the Levstik Award twice, in 1960 for Okoli in okoli (Round and Round) and in 1966 for Vohljači in prepovedane skrivnosti (The Snoopers and Forbidden Secrets).She was married to the writer and playwright Ivan Potrč and their daughter Marjetica Potrč is an architect.