Miha Mazzini


Miha Mazzini is a Slovenian writer, screenwriter and film director with thirty published books, translated in ten languages. He has a PhD in anthropology from the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis and has MA in Creative Writing for Film and Television at The University of Sheffield. He is a Voting member of the European Film Academy.

Biography

He described his childhood living with his mother and grandmother in Titoist Yugoslavia, in two novels. The protagonist of the 2002 novel King of the Rattling Spirits is 12 years old and in the 2015 novel Childhood the protagonist is five.
His first novel Crumbs was set in his hometown of Jesenice and published in 1989 and sold 54,000 copies. It won the government award for the best novel of the year and Mazzini won the award for excellent artistic achievement by a young writer, given by the opposition. That was highly unusual for the times when Yugoslavia started slowly breaking apart.https://www.theskinny.co.uk/books/features/a-literature-of-independence-miha-mazzini

Work

Genre

Mazzini introduced in the post-1990 Slovene literature a tough protagonist, characteristic of Noir fiction, in his novel Guarding Hanna.

Awards

His Cartier Project was the all-time best-selling novel in Yugoslavia. It won the 1987 Best Novel of the Year award from both the pro-government and opposition newspapers.
Later his work was selected for many international anthologies, recently his short story Mother was included in Contemporary European Fiction anthology and short story Avro Lancaster in Best European Fiction 2018 anthology.
In 2012, one of his stories received the Pushcart Prize.
Mazzini won the 2016 Kresnik Award for his novel Otroštvo.
in 2019 he won best screenplay for the film Erased at FEST festival, Belgrade, Serbia, and at the Raindance festival, London, UK.

Reviews

—Village Voice
—Seattle Times

Commentary

In October 2019, Mazzini commented on the decision of Swedish Academy to give the Nobel Prize for literature to Peter Handke by saying, "some artists sold their human souls for ideologies, some for hate, some for money and power but the one that offended me the most was Handke with his naivety for the Milošević regime I found him cruel and totally self-absorbed in his naivety."

Fiction books in English

A Very Simple Story script in multiple languages, read by actresses from different countries. Screenwriter and director of Slovenian and Italian film. Project was nominated for the Prix Europe award.