Dubravka Ugrešić

Biography

In 1988 the NIN Award, given for the best Yugoslav novel of the year, went to a woman for the first time. She was Dubravka Ugrešić, and the book was “Fording the Stream of Consciousness”, in which an international family of writers gathers for a conference in Zagreb.

She was born on 27 March 1949 in Kutina. Her father was a Croat, her mother a Bulgarian from Varna. She studied at a faculty where comparative literature and the Russian language were taught, later studied at Moscow University, and then worked at the Institute for Theory of Literature in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb. There she worked on Russian literature and the Russian avant-garde: in 1980 she published a book on new Russian fiction, followed by an anthology of alternative Russian prose, “A Slap in the Hand” (“Pljuska u ruci”). With Aleksandar Flaker she edited the multi-volume “Glossary of the Russian Avant-Garde” (“Pojmovnik ruske avangarde”), which ran to nine or ten volumes (sources differ). From Russian she translated Daniil Kharms and Boris Pilnyak. Her literary career began before her university career: in 1971 came a collection of children’s stories and fairy tales, “Mali plamen” (“A Small Flame”), and two more books for children appeared later. Then followed the short stories “Poza za prozu” (“A Pose for Prose”, 1978) and “Život je bajka” (“Life Is a Fairy Tale”, 1983). In Yugoslavia she became best known for the novella “Steffie Speck in the Jaws of Life” (1981). Its heroine, a young typist, looks for love, and the text is built like a sewing pattern: its chapters are named after tailoring terms, with quotations, letters and everyday advice stitched into them. References to Flaubert and Bohumil Hrabal stand beside the clichés of the romance novel. In 1984 Rajko Grlić made it into the film “In the Jaws of Life”, and Ugrešić herself wrote the screenplay; she wrote other scripts for cinema and television as well. I would say that her lasting method is already visible here: a parody that does not destroy its material but plays with it in earnest.

In the early 1990s, with the war in Yugoslavia, she took an anti-war and anti-nationalist stand and wrote about it in essays. Part of the Croatian media and fellow writers called her a “traitor”, a “public enemy” and a “witch”. In 1993 she left Croatia. She taught at universities in Europe and the United States, among them UCLA, Harvard, Wesleyan and Columbia, and lived in Germany and the United States. The essays of those years went into “Have a Nice Day” (“Američki fikcionar”, 1993) and “The Culture of Lies” (1996), for which she received the Charles Veillon European Essay Prize.

From 1996, by other accounts from 2001, she lived in Amsterdam, and she described herself as a post-Yugoslav and postnational writer. The subject of her novels became exile: “The Museum of Unconditional Surrender” (1996), with a narrator in post-Wall Berlin, and “The Ministry of Pain” (2004), about émigrés in Amsterdam. In the essays of “Thank You for Not Reading” (2000) she examined the publishing market and the position of the writer. The novel “Baba Yaga Laid an Egg” (2008) is built on a Slavic mythological figure and deals with inequality and discrimination against women; in 2010 it won the James Tiptree Jr. Award. In 2017 she signed the Declaration on the Common Language of the Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrins.

Her books have been translated into almost all European languages. Her awards include the Meša Selimović Prize (1988), the City of Zagreb Prize (1989), the Heinrich Mann Prize (2000), the Italian Premio Feronia – Città di Fiano (2004), the Jean Améry Prize for European Essays (2012), the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (2016) and the Vilenica Prize in Slovenia (2016). In 1997 the Dutch foundation Stichting Kunstenaarsverzet 1942–1945 (Artists in Resistance) awarded her a Resistance Prize.

Ugrešić died in Amsterdam on 17 March 2023, ten days before her seventy-fourth birthday.