He is a professor at the Department of Cultural Studies of the University of Ljubljana and Director of the Centre of Religious and Cultural Studies.
Aleš Debeljak graduated in Comparative Literature from the University of Ljubljana and received his PhD in Social Thought from Syracuse University, New York. He was a Senior Fullbright fellow at the University of California and a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study at Collegium Budapest. He was a contributing editor for the Prague Literary Review and Verse, and a member of the editorial committee of the Davies Publishing Group and general editor of the series Terra Incognita: Writings from Central Europe, published by the White Pine Press.
He is considered as one of the great poets from Central Europe, and has published eight books of essays and six books of poetry in Slovenian. The following books of poems have been translated into English: Anxious Moments (1994), Dictionary of Silence (1999) and The City and the Child (1999), and so have the following essays: Twilight of the Idols: Recollections of a Lost Yugoslavia (1994), Reluctant Modernity: The Institution of Art and its Historical Forms (1998) and The Imagination of Terra Incognita: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 (1997).
He was awarded the Prešeren Foundation Prize -the Slovenian national book prize-, the Israeli Miriam Lindberg Poetry for Peace Prize, and Tokyo's Chiqyu Prize for Poetry. In spring 2002 he was the guest professor at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria.
