Alma Maximiliana Karlin (October 12, 1889 – January 14, 1950) was a Slovenian traveler, writer, poet, collector, polyglot and theosophist.

[5] Alma grew in a predominately German-speaking milieu, and regarded herself chiefly as Austrian rather than ethnic German or Slovene.

[citation needed] She was born with a spinal defect and wore devices intended to remedy this during her childhood.

She learned English, French, Latin, Italian, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Russian, and Spanish.

[4] She had to move to Sweden and Norway, since she was considered a persona non grata in the United Kingdom for being an Austrian-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.

To this purpose, she opened a language school in Celje, where she taught up to ten hours a day, while her spare time was spent in painting and writing.

In January 1928, at the request of her dying mother, Alma Karlin returned home, herself exhausted by physical illness and deep depression.

[5] In 1937–38, the Franco-German journalist and anti-Nazi writer Hans Joachim Bonsack found refuge in her home.

Soon after the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941 and the German occupation of Lower Styria, she was arrested and sent to Maribor where she waited for the extradition in Serbia, along with thousands of Slovenes.

She was released to house arrest thanks to the vigorous intervention of Gammelin and a Gestapo officer who turned out to appreciate Karlin's books.

[4] In spring 1944, she decided to escape to the southern Slovenian region of White Carniola, which was controlled by the Slovene partisan resistance.

She died of breast cancer and tuberculosis on January 14, 1950, in the village of Pečovnik near Celje and is buried alongside Thea Schreiber Gammelin (1906–1988) in the Svetina churchyard.

Some of were reprinted; three of her most important travel books sold over 80,000 copies at the time and were translated into English, French and Finnish.