Ivan Cankar was a Slovene writer, playwright, essayist, poet and political activist. Together with Oton upani, Dragotin Kette, and Josip Murn, he is considered as the beginner of modernism in Slovene literature. He is regarded as the greatest writer in the Slovene language, and has sometimes been compared to Franz Kafka and James Joyce.
Ivan Cankar was born in the Carniolan town of Vrhnika near Ljubljana. He was one of the many children of a poor artisan who emigrated to Bosnia shortly after Ivans birth. He was raised by his mother, Nea Cankar ne Pivk, with whom he established a close, but ambivalent relationship. The figure of a selfsacrificing and submissively repressive mother would later become one of the most recognizable features of Cankars prose. After finishing grammar school in his hometown, he studied at the Technical High School in Ljubljana.
Source: Wikipedia