Hrvatska pjesnikinja Anka Žagar rođena je 6. srpnja 1954. u Zamostu u Gorskom Kotaru.
Polazila je školu u Plešcima i Čabru, a u Zagrebu studirala i diplomirala na Filozofskome fakultetu jugoslavenske jezike i književnosti te komparativnu književnost.
Goranov vijenac za poeziju dobila je 1994. godine.
Neka njezina djela je u njenoj antologiji Zywe zradla iz 1996. s hrvatskog na poljski prevela poljska književnica i prevoditeljica Lucja Danielewska.
Zastupljena je u mnogim antologijama suvremenoga hrvatskog pjesništva u zemlji i inozemstvu te prevedena na mnoge jezike.

source: Knjižnice grada Zagreba


Anka Zagar was born in 1954 in Zamost, in the Gorski Kotar region of Croatia. She attended elementary school in Plesac, and high school in Cabar. Zagar graduated in Croatian and comparative literature at the Arts Faculty in Zagreb, and currently works as a librarian. One of the most acclaimed Croatian poets, she has published six books of poetry and a number of collector’s editions, illustrated with original etchings by famous Croatian graphic artists.
Anka Zagar lives her life as a poet far from the madding crowd of the Croatian literary communities. Devoid of vanity, indifferent to the changes of fashion, Anka Zagar has evolved her own individual style and conception of art comparable to contemporary American ‘Language’ poetry. She places an emphasis on issues of language, voice and persona, and has always remained true to her peculiar, unimitated and unimitable turn of phrase. Kresimir Bagic, in his book of essays entitled Living Tongues, a deep reading of modern Croatian poetry from the fifties to the nineties, also writes about Zagar’s poetics. He points to her visible independence on the level of language. Anka Zagar approaches the poem as an area in which language is continually recreated. He calls her expression postmodern because it contains visibility, obscurity, variety and ‘momentality’ as typical stylistic devices of the postmodern strategy of writing.

Anka Zagar is one of the leading Croatian poets of the second half of the twentieth century. Although she refrains from using labels herself, in critical discussion the more or less felicitous phrase ‘semantic concretism’ has been adopted for her work. Pseudo-infantile incantation, stream of consciousness, punning with words, unexpected blending of tradition and modernism, original syntactic interventions, arbitrary punctuation, neologisms and the sublimation of Croatian folk phrasing make her poetry extremely demanding when it comes to translation.

source: Poetry International