Irena Brežná

Irena Brežná was born in 1950 in Bratislava, which was then in Czechoslovakia. Together with her parents she emigrated to Switzerland in 1968. She studied Slavic languages, philosophy and psychology at the University of Basel and has been working since then as a journalist, writer, psychologist, Russian teacher, interpreter, and human rights activist. She received several awards for her work as a writer and journalist, among other the Theodor Wollf Prize for her reports from the Chechen Republic and the Swiss Literary Prize for her novel Die undankbare Fremde.