Tomaz Šalamun was born in Zagreb, Croatia, raised in Koper, Slovenia, and now makes his home in Ljubljana. He studied art history and worked as a curator and a conceptual artist before turning to the written word. Having published 25 volumes of poems in his native Yugoslavia/Slovenia, Šalamun has received many prizes in Europe and been translated into nearly a dozen languages. The Selected Poems of Tomaz Šalamun, edited and in large part translated by Charles Simic, was the poet's debut collection in English, brought out in 1988 as part of Ecco Press's prestigious Modern European Poetry series. It was followed by The Shepherd, The Hunter (Pedernal, 1992), The Four Questions Of Melancholy (White Pine Press, 1997), Feast (Harcourt, 2000), and The Book for My Brother (Harvest Books, 2006).