Bert Pribac was born in the hamlet of Sergase on the Istrian peninsula, a part of Slovenia which belonged to pre-war Italy. Consequently he gained his primary schooling in Italian. He then studied four years of comparative literature at the University of Ljubljana and published poetry in literary magazines. In Australia he gained a Master of Arts degree in librarianship from the University of NSW and worked as a librarian in the Commonwealth Department of Health in Canberra from 1966. He travelled widely to study the field of medical librarianship. Pribac also acted as a consultant on hospital libraries to the World Health Organisation. From 1976 he worked as co-editor of the Slovenian language radio program on Radio 2XX Canberra and he also translated a large body of contemporary Australian poetry into Slovenian. Some have been read on Ljubljana Radio. In 1983 the Melbourne literary magazine, Helix, published his first poems written in English. He returned to Slovenia around 2000-2001.
(Source: 'Bert Pribac' in Literature ed. Rudi Krausmann (1987): 20)
