In Elvis's Room

Overview

Sebastijan Pregelj’s award-winning novel, In Elvis’s Room, tells the turbulent story of Slovenian independence from the perspective of Jan, an only child growing up in Ljubljana.

Jan’s life in 1980s Yugoslavia is idyllic, filled with family outings, Star Wars, and good friends. But as Jan gets older, and the ties that have held together Yugoslavia begin to tatter, the contours of life change. He and his friends, Elvis and Peter, are bullied walking to and from school, because Elvis is Muslim and Peter is a bookworm.

The friends stand by one another, strengthening not only their friendships but those of the families, particularly Elvis’s. Jan spends many happy hours with Elvis’s family, but then he is called up for military service and good times are replaced with whispers about religion and purges.

In Elvis’s Room confronts history—both its beauty and horror—without hiding anything, and in doing so tells a highly nuanced, emotionally-charged story about living with memories from a country that no longer exists and what it requires of individuals to carry that immense weight.

Reviews

"[T]his epic, decades-spanning book is an absolute knockout, with writing that is muscular and gentle, and characters that are layered, complex, and dazzlingly alive." —Marcia DeSanctis, Author of A Hard Place to Leave

Author Biography

Sebastijan Pregelj was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 1970 and studied history at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana. He has published six novels, including Kronika pozabljanja (A Chronicle of Forgetting, 2014), which was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, and V Elvisovi sobi (In Elvis’s Room, 2019), which won the Cankar Award and was shortlisted for the Kresnik Award for Best Slovene Novel. He also writes books for children. Pregelj lives and works in Ljubljana and is a member of the Slovene Writers’ Association.

Rawley Grau has translated numerous works from Slovenian, including two novels by Dušan Šarotar, Panorama and Billiards at the Hotel Dobray, both of which were shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. In 2021, he was awarded the Lavrin Diploma for excellence in translation from the Slovenian Association of Literary Translators. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, he has lived in Ljubljana, Slovenia, for the past two decades.