Alma M. Karlin

Alma Maximiliana Karlin (October 12, 1889 – January 14, 1950) was a Slovenian traveler, writer, poet, collector, polyglot and theosophist. She was one of the first European women to circle the globe alone.

Biography

She was born in the Styrian town of Celje (now part of Slovenia) in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire as the daughter of Jakob Karlin (1829–1898), a major in the Austro-Hungarian Army, and Wilibalde Miheljak (a.k.a. Vilibalda, 1844–1928), a teacher. Her father, aged around 66, died when she was eight years old. Alma grew in a predominately German-speaking milieu, and regarded herself chiefly as Austrian rather than ethnic German or Slovene. She was born with a spinal defect and wore devices intended to remedy this during her childhood.

After completing her secondary education in Graz, she traveled to London in 1908, where she studied languages. She learned English, French, Latin, Italian, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Russian, and Spanish. In the later years, she also studied Persian, Chinese, and Japanese. She also spent six months in Paris, where she attended various languages courses at the Sorbonne. and learned Esperanto.

It was at this time when she started work on her (unpublished) dictionary of ten languages, including Slovene.

At the outbreak of World War I in 1914 Karlin was in London working as a translator. She had to move to Sweden and Norway, since she was considered a persona non grata in the United Kingdom for being an Austro-Hungarian citizen. It was in Scandinavia that she met the Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf, who was so impressed by Karlin and her writing that she proposed her for a Nobel Prize.