Slavenka Drakulić


Slavenka Drakulić is a Croatian journalist, novelist, and essayist whose works on feminism, communism, and post-communism have been translated into many languages.
Drakulić was born in Rijeka, Croatia, on July 4, 1949. She graduated in comparative literature and sociology from the University in Zagreb in 1976. From 1982 to 1992, she was a staff writer for the Start bi-weekly newspaper and news weekly Danas, writing mainly on feminist issues. In addition to her novels and collections of essays, Drakulić's work has appeared in The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Internazionale, The Nation, La Stampa, Dagens Nyheter, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Eurozine, Politiken and The Guardian. She is a contributing editor for The Nation. She lives in Croatia and in Sweden.

Biography

Drakulić temporarily left Croatia for Sweden in the early 1990s for political reasons. A notorious unsigned 1992 Globus article accused five Croatian female writers, Drakulić included, of being "witches" and of "raping" Croatia. According to Letica, these writers failed to take a definitive stance against rape as a planned military tactic by Bosnian Serb forces against Croats, and rather treated it as crimes of "unidentified males" against women. Soon after the publication, Drakulić started to receive telephone threats; her property was also vandalized. Finding little or no support from her erstwhile friends and colleagues, she decided to leave Croatia.
Her noted works relate to the Yugoslav wars. As If I Am Not There is about crimes against women in the Bosnian War, while They Would Never Hurt a Fly is a book in which she also analyzed her experience overseeing the proceedings and the inmates of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague. Both books touch on the same issues that caused her wartime emigration from the home country. In scholarly circles, she is better known for her two collections of essays; "How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed" and 'Cafe Europa'. These are both non-fiction accounts of Drakulić's life during and after communism.
Her 2008 novel, Frida's Bed, is based on a biography of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo.
Her latest book of essays A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism: Fables from a Mouse, a Parrot, a Bear, a Cat, a Mole, a Pig, a Dog, & a Raven was published in February 2011 in the US by Penguin, and widely reviewed to great acclaim. The book consists of eight reflections told from the point of view of a different animal. Each beast reflects on the remembrance of communism in different countries in Eastern Europe. Although some reviewers interpreted the book as condemnation of communism and its lingering effects, the book also critiques the ravages of the economic system that replaced it. In the second to last chapter, a Romanian dog explains that under capitalism everyone is unequal “but some are more unequal than others,” an inversion of a famous George Orwell quote from Animal Farm.
Drakulić lives in Stockholm and Zagreb.

Fiction