Lili Novy
Slovenian writer (1885-1958)

Lili Novy née Haumeder (24 December 1885 – 7 March 1958) was a Slovene poet and translator of poetry. She is considered the first Slovene female lyric poet as well as one of the most important Slovene female poets in general.
Biography
She was born in Graz as Lili Haumeder to an ethnic German father named Guid Haumeder and a Slovene mother Ludvika Ahačič. She was educated privately and began writing poetry in German.
In her mid twenties she began to include herself in the Slovene literary scene and began translating Prešeren's German poems into Slovene and vice versa and also began publishing in literary magazines. She also translated a lot of Goethe into Slovene. Gradually, under the influence of Alojz Gradnik, she began writing her own poetry in Slovene. During her lifetime only one collection of her own poems was published: Temna vrata (Dark Door) (1941). After spending an entire life on the move with a husband in the military, Lili Novy eventually settled in Ljubljana.
Death and legacy
Novy died in 1958 at Ljubljana.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Lili Novy” is slovenian writer (1885-1958). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Lili, Novy and Slovenian, not as a finished interpretation.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6547623. VIAF identifies the subject as 71240331. The Library of Congress control number is nr90016108. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1885, 1958 and 1941.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lili Novy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.