Ana Schnabl

Ana Schnabl discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Ana Schnabl is a Slovenian writer and editor. She writes for several Slovenian media outlets and is a monthly columnist for the Guardian. Her collection of short stories Razvezani (Beletrina, 2017) met with critical acclaim. Three years later Schnabl published her first novel Masterpiece (Mojstrovina, Beletrina, 2020). Her second novel Flood Tide (Plima, Beletrina, 2022) was nominated for the Slovenian Kresnik Award. Her third novel September (Beletrina, 2024) won the Kresnik Award in 2025.

1. Dog Behaviour: I’ve got two dogs, and it took me longer than I’d like to admit to figure out what they were actually saying.

2. The Concept of Universal Basic Income: I suspect that for a lot of people, Universal Basic Income sounds like a fantasy dreamt up by the lazy and the work-shy—a clever way to dodge the nine-to-five. In reality, it’s nothing of the sort.

3. Mina Mazzini: Known simply as Mina, she was nothing short of a force of nature—Italy’s greatest voice and legend. Her vocal range was outrageous and her stage presence magnetic.

4. Jellyfish: I grew up spending summers on the Slovene coast, where most beach conversations about jellyfish revolved around how nasty they are. I think it’s time to give them a bit of a rebrand.

5. Lojze Kovačič's The Newcomers: I know I sound like a total boomer saying this, but The Newcomers really is a masterpiece—a towering work of autofiction, written decades before “autofiction” was even a buzzword on Goodreads.

6. Yugoslavia: I’m not yugonostalgic—I was simply born too late to have any real experience of living there. But I am a defender of some of the genuinely progressive ideas and policies that Yugoslavia introduced and managed to sustain.

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