Alma M. Karlin

Born in Celje in 1889, Alma M. Karlin was a Slovenian writer, traveler, poet, collector, polyglot, and theosophist. She is remembered above all for setting out in 1919 on a long solo journey around the world, an extraordinary undertaking for a woman of her time, and for transforming those experiences into travel writing that brought distant places to readers across Europe.

She wrote mainly in German and built a reputation through travel books, stories, essays, and lectures. Her life was marked not only by movement and ambition, but also by intense intellectual curiosity: she studied languages, gathered objects on her travels, and developed strong interests in cultures, religions, and spiritual ideas beyond Europe.

In later years she lived again near Celje, where she spent the final part of her life and died in 1950. Today she is remembered as a singular literary and historical figure—an adventurous observer of the wider world, and a woman who insisted on making an unconventional life for herself long before that was common.