Ilma Rakusa was born in 1946 in
Rimavská Sobota,
Slovakia to a Slovenian father and a Hungarian mother. She spent her early childhood in
Budapest,
Ljubljana and
Trieste. In 1951, her family moved to
Zürich,
Switzerland. Ilma Rakusa attended the
Volksschule and the
Gymnasium in
Zürich. After the
Matura, she studied Slavic and Romance Languages and Literature in Zürich,
Paris and
Leningrad between 1965 and 1971. In 1971, she was awarded a doctorate for her thesis titled
Studien zum Motiv der Einsamkeit in der russischen Literatur, about themes of
loneliness in Russian literature. From 1971 to 1977, she was a
Wissenschaftlicher Assistent at the Slavic Seminar at the
University of Zurich (UZH). From 1977 to 2006, she worked at UZH as a . In 1977, Rakusa authored her first book, a collection of poems titled
Wie Winter. She has since published numerous collections of poetry, short stories and essays. Rakusa works as a translator from French, Russian, Serbo-Croatian and Hungarian into German. Rakusa also works as a journalist (
Neue Zürcher Zeitung and
Die Zeit). In 2010/2011, she was a fellow at the
Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. ==Awards and honors==