Alive Against All Odds
Alive Against All Odds
Storytelling as a sole mode of survival
Nataša Kramberger’s literary narrative Alive Against All Odds (in Slovenian: Po vsej sili živ), for which she received the Prešeren Fund Prize in 2025, arises from the sense that the world as we once knew it has begun to change irreversibly. Floods, fires, droughts, and landslides are no longer distant images of the future, but part of everyday experience. The book interweaves personal testimony, documentary accounts of life on a farm not far from Maribor, and essayistic reflection on a world in which nature is no longer merely a backdrop, but an active force directly shaping human lives.
Its fragmentary structure, without a conventional plot or central conflict, persists in a continual recommencement, much like the natural cycles that determine the rhythm of farming. At the centre of Kramberger’s writing is not the autonomous individual, but the human being embedded in broader meteorological, biological, and ecological processes, while storytelling itself becomes one of the few remaining ways of preserving meaning in the world.
This world-premiere stage adaptation is created in dialogue with Nataša Kramberger’s autobiographical and essayistic writing, above all Alive Against All Odds and Comparable Hectares (in Slovenian: Primerljivi hektarji), and opens up questions of life in a time of climate catastrophe, as well as of the human relationship to land, community, and the future. Mojca Madon, a director of the younger generation, will be staging her first production at the Maribor Drama; from individual textual segments she will construct a space of shared existence in which the relationship to nature is inseparably intertwined with the question of responsibility toward others. The central image of the production will be that of a falling tree, as a figure of a world losing its balance, while community remains one of the few spaces in which the possibility of endurance still survives.
Fran Žižek Hall
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