Dubravka Ugrešić


Dubravka Ugrešić is a writer born and raised in Yugoslavia. A graduate of University of Zagreb, she has been based in Amsterdam since 1996.

Early life and education

Ugrešić majored in comparative literature and Russian language at the University of Zagreb's Faculty of Arts, pursuing parallel careers as a scholar and as a writer. After graduation she continued to work at the university, at the Institute for Theory of Literature. In 1993 she left Croatia for political reasons. She has spent time teaching at European and American universities, including UNC-Chapel Hill, UCLA, Harvard University, and Columbia University. She is based in Amsterdam where she is a freelance writer and contributor to several American and European literary magazines and newspapers.

Writing

Novels and short stories

Dubravka Ugrešić has published novels and short story collections. Her novella is Steffie Speck in the Jaws of Life, published in 1981. Filled with references to works of both high literature and trivial genres, it represents a sophisticated and lighthearted postmodern play with the traditional concept of the novel. It follows a young typist named Steffie Speck, whose name was taken from a Dear Abby column, as she searches for love, both parodying and being compelled by the kitschy elements of romance. The novel was made into a successful 1984 Yugoslav film In the Jaws of Life, directed by Rajko Grlić.
Regarding her writing, Ugrešić remarked:
Her novel Fording the Stream of Consciousness received the NIN Award in 1988, the highest literary honor in former Yugoslavia, whose winners include Danilo Kiš and Milorad Pavić; Ugrešić was the first woman to be awarded the prize. The novel is Bulgakov-like “thriller” about an international "family of writers" who gather at a conference in Zagreb during Yugoslavian times. Museum of Unconditional Surrender is a novel about the melancholy of remembrance and forgetting. A female narrator, an exile, surrounded by scenery of post-Wall Berlin and images of her war-torn country Yugoslavia, constantly changes the time zones of her life, past and present.
Set in Amsterdam, Ministry of Pain portrays the lives of displaced people. In the novel Baba Yaga Laid An Egg, published in the Canongate Myth Series Ugrešić draws on the Slavic mythological figure of Baba Yaga to tell a modern fairy tale. It concerns societal gender inequalities and discrimination.

Essays

Ugrešić’s “creative work resists reduction to simplified isolated interpretative models”.
Her collection Have A Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream consists of short dictionary-like essays on American everyday existence, seen through the lenses of a visitor whose country is falling apart. The Culture of Lies is a volume of essays on ordinary lives in a time of war, nationalism and collective paranoia. "Her writing attacks the savage stupidities of war, punctures the macho heroism that surrounds it, and plumbs the depths of the pain and pathos of exile" according to Richard Byrne of Common Review. Thank You For Not Reading is a collection of essays on literary trivia: the publishing industry, literature, culture and the place of writing.
Ugrešić received several major awards for her essays, including Charles Veillon Prize, Heinrich Mann Prize, Jean Amery Prize. In the United States, Karaoke Culture was shortlisted for National Book Critic Circle Award.

Other writings

Dubravka Ugrešić is also a literary scholar who has published articles on Russian avant-garde literature, and a scholarly book on Russian contemporary fiction Nova ruska proza. She has edited anthologies, such as Pljuska u ruci, co-edited nine volumes of Pojmovnik ruske avangarde, and translated writers such as Boris Pilnyak and Danil Kharms. She is also the author of three books for children.

Politics and exile

At the outbreak of the war in 1991 in former Yugoslavia, Ugrešić took a firm anti-war and anti-nationalist stand. She wrote critically about nationalism, the stupidity and the criminality of war, and soon became a target of parts of the Croatian media, fellow writers and public figures. She had been accused of anti-patriotism and proclaimed a “traitor”, a “public enemy” and a “witch”. She left Croatia in 1993 after a long-lasting series of public attacks, and because she “could not adapt to the permanent terror of lies in public, political, cultural, and everyday life”. She wrote about her experience of a collective nationalist hysteria in her book The Culture of Lies, and described her “personal case” in the essay “The Question of Perspective". She continues to write about dark sides of modern societies, about the “homogenization” of people induced by media, politics, religion, common beliefs and the marketplace. Being “the citizen of a ruin” she is interested in the complexity of a “condition called exile”. Her novels explore exile traumas, but also the excitement of exile freedom. Her essay “Writer in Exile” is a small writer's guide to exile. She describes herself as "post-Yugoslav, transnational, or, even more precisely, postnational".
In 2017, she signed the Declaration on the Common Language of the Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrins.

Literary awards