With its echoes of fellow Austrian novelist Robert Musil's novella Young Torless, and of Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum, Florjan Lipu 's Young Tja, first published in 1972, helped moved the critique of Germanic Europe's fundamental social conformity into the postwar age.

Florjan Lipu was born in 1937 in the village of Lobnik (Lobnig), in Austrian Carinthia. Since the 1960 he has been one of the foremost proponents of Carinthian Slovene literature and its leading prose writer. He is the author of four novels and six book-length collections of short fiction and essays in Slovene. In 2004, he was awarded the Pre eren Prize, Slovenia's most prestigious award for lifelong literary achievement.