Elika Award of the Slovenian Book Fair - Best Book 2024
“We emerge from this book changed, like coming out of a deep forest. We have leaves in our hair, grass on our clothes, a river in our shoes, the horizon in our eyes, we feel the underground, our skin trembles from the fragrant wind, and above us in the clear darkness shines the constellation of the Great Bear. Not only because of the descriptions of nature, animals, solitude, mythology, but also because of the people the author meets on her paths. Above all, it is a story about a woman who changes, about a body that grows stronger from all it has seen, overcome, and felt. This is one of the most beautiful nature writings I have read, precisely because it speaks about the wild land we still live in. And what an endless luxury that is.” – Irena Štaudohar
“My literary hero would read Irene Cerar’s Nature Sanctuaries with affection. And if I think about it, I send him among trees, rocks, and bears on Krim with similar troubles as the author has... Does it help? If I may answer with words from the book before you: He can move, he is not chained. For now, that is enough.” – Tadej Golob
With the book Nature Sanctuaries, Irene Cerar, author of popular excursion guides, set herself a special challenge: for seven weeks she ventured into nature to experience each of the most characteristic Slovenian habitats (forest, caves, mountains, wetlands, rivers, seashore, cultural landscape) firsthand. Not just as a passing hiker and traveler, but as a careful observer.
The paths and stays led the author from a solitary hut in the wilderness of the Kočevje forest, among shepherds and wolves in the mountain pastures beneath the foothills of Slovenian mountains, along riverbeds of the Prekmurje plains where she unexpectedly experienced catastrophic summer floods, into the Škocjan Caves with their rich research history, to the Slovenian coast, salt pans, and beyond. Her experience was deepened by various people who know these places well or explore them passionately.
The book Nature Sanctuaries is a blend of field experience, personal reflections, natural science curiosities, literary and mythological perspectives, offering the reader a layered experience of nature in all its diversity. It is also an honest attempt at dialogue with landscapes, visible and invisible, external and internal.
An original work by one of our most sensitive observers of natural landscapes and their diverse meanings.
