On the eve of Culture Day, the highest national awards for outstanding achievement in arts and culture will be given out at a special ceremony tonight. Artist Bogdan Borcic and flautist Irena Grafenauer are this year's Preseren Awards laureates.
Both artists of international renown, Borcic will be honoured for his entire oeuvre and Grafenauer for her excellent performances. Instead of a key-note speaker, both laureates have been invited to address the traditional award-winning ceremony.
Borcic, born in 1926, is a painter, but is primarily known as a graphic artist. In fact, he is considered to be one the finest Slovenian graphic artists. Ever since he can remember, he wanted to paint.
A traumatic experience of a concentration camp has often featured in his art. He was deported to Dachau in 1944 as a young activist in the Partisan resistance movement. During the time at Dachau he was drawing scenes from the Nazi camp.
In May 2004 Borcic was invited by the Dachau museum to exhibit his works related to the concentration camp there. At the time, Borcic re-visited the places of his "traumatic memories" for the first time.
Borcic has received a number of awards, including a Preseren Fund Award in 1965, and had more than 100 solo exhibitions at home and abroad. He used to teach at the Ljubljana Academy of Fine Arts, where he first studied art after WWII.
A regular guest of the most eminent festivals on all continents, flautist Irena Grafenauer has been active on the music scene since mid 1970s, when she won a series of prestigious international competitions in Belgrade, Geneva and Munich.
She has had hundreds of concerts around the world and recorded many records for labels such as Philips, Deutsche Grammophon and Sony Classical. On 27 January 2003, Mozart's birthday, Grafenauer had her blood tested and a day later learnt she had cancer.
Grafenauer, a professor at the Salzburg Mozarteum since 1987, revealed she was suffering from incurable leukaemia over a year ago when she was decorated with a state order by the president of Slovenia.
"I could only survive with the help of a donor of compatible bone marrow," Grafenauer said at the time in an attempt to persuade as many Slovenians as possible to put their name on the list of donors. Many followed her appeal.
The Preseren Award does not imply only prestige, but also brings financial reward as each award brings its owner SIT 4.3 million or EUR 17,900. No more than two awards of its kind are given out annually.
While the recipients of the Preseren Awards were made public in early December, the winners of minor Preseren awards, Preseren Fund Awards, will be revealed only tonight. Up to six such awards - each worth SIT 1.43m (EUR 5,900) - can be conferred.
Tonight's ceremony will be held at the arts centre Cankarjev dom on the eve of 156 years since the death of France Preseren. Preseren is considered to be the greatest Slovenian poet, and has as such given the awards the name.
All laureates as well as the board of the Preseren Fund, who select the winners, will be received at a special reception hosted by Culture Minister Vasko Simoniti on Culture Day.
Last year only one Preseren Award was given out. It went to Florjan Lipus, one of the finest authors of Slovenian fiction. A member of the ethnic minority in Austria, Lipus writes about the modern reality of the minority through a bitter personal experience and in an unconventional manner.
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