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Shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2009
Winner of the PEN writers in translation Award 2006 - Winner of UK Arts Council Award 2006 - Awarded the S.Fischer Fellowship, Frei Universitat Berlin 2006 - Shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2006 - Premio Feronio-Citta di Fiano, Italy 2004 - Heinrich Mann Prize (Akademie Der Kunste Berlin) 2000 - Felix Meritis Foundation Prize Amsterdam 1999
Osterrechischen Staatspreis fur Europaische Literatur 1999 - SWF-Bestenliste Literaturpreis Germany 1998 - Verzetsprijs Amsterdam 1997 - Winner of Prix Europeen de I'Essai 'Charles Veillon', Zurich 1996
‘A writer to follow, a writer to be cherished.’ Susan Sontag
‘A unique tone of voice, a madcap wit and a lively sense of the absurd. Ingenious.’ Marina Warner
According to Slavic myth, Baba Yaga is a witch who lives in a house built on chicken legs and kidnaps small children. In Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, internationally acclaimed writer Dubravka Ugresic takes the timeless legend and spins it into a fresh and distinctly modern tale of femininity, aging, identity, and love.
With barbed wisdom and razor-sharp wit, Ugresic weaves together the stories of four women in contemporary Eastern Europe: a writer who grants her dying mother’s final wish by travelling to her home town in Bulgaria, an elderly woman who wakes up every day hoping to die, a buxom blonde hospital worker who’s given up on love, and a serial widow who harbours a secret talent for writing. Through the women’s fears and desires, and their struggles against invisibility, Ugresic presents a brilliantly postmodern retelling of an ancient myth that is infused with humanity and the joy of storytelling.
‘Reaffirms the glorious power of storytelling. A book packed with intellectual surprises and emotional revelations’ Metro
‘Ugresic’s retelling may be blisteringly post modern in its execution but at its heart is a human warmth and even a silliness that infuses it with the sweet magic of storytelling.’ The Times
'A mirthlessly witty divertimento on female old age. Ugresic’s meta-narrative sings with intelligence; its cryptic weirdness challenges the reader. . . . A whirligig of outrageous invention.' The Independent
'Ugresic's instincts as a storyteller are sure...A playful, inventive, and humane look at women and aging.' Kirkus Review
'Beautifully written, dolefully humorous . . . Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is a grown up novel with grown up prepositions; its humane vision of the world is driven by great imaginative impetus.' Times Literary Supplement
'A profound and startling meditation on femininity and aging.' London Review of Books
Canongate UK
Berlin Verlag Germany
Tiderne Skifter Denmark
Bonnier Sweden
Znak Poland
Eesti Estonia
Sigmapress Macedonia
Geopetika Serbia
Vukovic & Runjic Croatia
Teorema Portugal
Ink House Bulgaria
Eksmo Russia
Grove Atlantic USA
De Bezige Bij NL
Nottetempo Italy
Material: finished copies of various language editions (UK edition 327pp).
Ugresic at her sharpest, most controversial, most incisive. These are crucial essays for our times.
Ugresic reflects on big themes through the smallest of lenses, In ‘USA Nails’ she manages to find a connection between this post-September 11th world and New York nail bars. She gives small, seemingly trivial subjects – a cellar, a bird’s house, bottled water – universal meaning. She mixes the local and the global, the universal and the particular and raises the question of what is eastern in Western Europe and vice versa. As such, Nobody’s Home is an ‘after the fall of the Wall’ collection, the introductory motto being: ‘The Wall fell down. It fell on every man, on all of us.’
Ugresic’s essays surf with ease through places, culture, recent history, politics and everyday trivia. Constantly shifting perspectives she manages to draw the mental coordinates of our age. Nobody’s Home provides the reader with a light and humorous personal view on our dynamic contemporary everyday.
‘Her details are so very good: her fear of the dominant ficus plant in former Yugoslavia; her near-contraband purchases in Berlin; precise flavours from behind the-iron-curtain-as-was, including an archaic can of zgushchenka, Soviet-era Russian condensed milk that could be spread like jam. It is not all ostalgia for the former east's vanished parallel consumer world. She is just as exact on the meaning of the Vietnamese nail parlour in present-day New York, and on Amsterdam: its trees, its migrants who smuggle parrots and wash the dead for a living. I happened to read the Amsterdam sequence in exactly the picture-windowed, venerable Dutch cafe she wrote about, and felt dizzy as her description of the city overlapped and then overlaid the city outside the glass. Exactly accurate.’ Guardian
‘An exile from post-Yugoslav Croatia but not merely a 'Croatian' writer, Ugresic writes sharp and funny essays on life and art in a Europe where the actual, but not mental, borders have come down. From charming sketches on the value of luggage and the lure of gardens to migrants 'expelled from paradise', to finely observed longer pieces on Amsterdam (where she lives), the madness of 'identity' culture and 'the brisk fragrance of fresh money' in post-Communist states, she never commits a sloppy thought or a turgid sentence. Under her gaze, the tiredest topics of the 'tired' continent (migration, multiculturalism, 'new Europe') spring to life. Ellen Elias-Bursac's translation captures all her irony and mischief.’ Boyd Tonkin, Independent
‘This collection of her essays glitters with witty and profound observations on modern Europe. A genuinely free-thinker, Ugresic's attachment to absurdity leads her down paths where other writers fear to tread.’ The Independent
‘This book is part memoir, part shrewd observation, part travel writing at its best. Each section opens with a loving quotation from the Russian satirists Ilf and Petrov, and Ugresic writes with something of their impish genius.’ Elaine Feinstein, The Telegraph
Fabrika Serbia & Croatia
Fakel Bulgaria
Saqi UK
Berlin Verlag Germany
De Geus Holland
Anagrama Spain
ZNAK Poland
Open Letter Press, Rochester Univ. USA
Sphinx Agency Egypt
Albin Michel France
Material: Serbo-Croat, English, Dutch and German editions (278pp).
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ANGELUS PRIZE IN POLAND
SHORTLISTED FOR THE INDEPENDENT FOREIGN FICTION PRIZE 2006
Tanja Lucic is a young professor of literature at the University of Amsterdam. There, she finds her students are only a little younger than herself, and, like her, ex-Yugoslavs, refugees, exiles. Some of her students also work at the “Ministry”, a shop making things for the porn industry. All of her students have been uprooted, must confront their memories – emotional cocktails of loss, guilt and trauma – and ask whether they can salvage what is left of their broken lives. Amid the tense political climate of the war crime trials at The Hague, the novel elaborates a growing attraction between Tanja and her student Igor, but can future generations be spared the horror and suffering that they have witnessed? In a sophisticated first-person narrative, Ugresic asks to what extent exiles can ever truly give voice to their feelings in any language.
'...an edgy, extraordinary novel...specifically rooted in the disintegration of Yugoslavia but also offering universal insights into what it is like to lose home, nationality and language.' The Sunday Times
'Ugresic's work is unflinching and provocative, forever forging a balance between her cynicism of the West and her despair of, and obvious love for, the Balkans. This a disturbing read that should have you in its thrall.' The Times
‘A brave, accomplished, cultured novel, sombre and witty… despite the breadth and depth or its political and literary ambitions, the novel is possessed of a wonderful, clear simplicity. There are very pure pleasures in Ugresic’s honesty, her lightsome, moving prose, her ability to dance in a flash from outrage to satire to a heartfelt exposition of beauty.’ Guardian
'Ugresic's cunning, subtle technique is at its most powerful here. Tragedy mingles with pastiche and bizarre humours.The novel's conclusion is a profound and beautiful meditation on lost homes and territories, on the broken syntax of memory, on the self-inventions of rehabilitated refugees and on the capability to return and find what we left behind.' The Independent
‘Such is the sad state of our world today that there are a good many writers who have access to such imagery. Reading The Ministry of Pain, one of the first things you realise, though, is that there are few who handle it as sharply and unfussily as Ugresic. These are the details in which God (and the devil) hides. Ugresic shows as much genius for them in her fiction as she has in her essays, The Culture of Lies (1998), and the recent, marvellous Thank You For Not Reading… Ugresic's wit, driven by light lashes of irony and recurrent gallows humour, and her language, graceful and simple in Michael Henry Heim's superbly painless translation, make her themes - exile, absence, the coping stratagems of homelessness - more easily grasped than one might expect… She has produced a novel of insights and shocks. It is one that is both profound and brilliantly illuminated by a very humane clarity… After reading Ugresic, I felt that if I'd had to be in a Balkan foxhole in the early 1990s and had had her for company, I wouldn't have lacked for jokes, or a decent chance of survival. So sure is her grasp of her themes, in fact, that it really constitutes a further pillar of her own argument: that perhaps the only way to attempt to make peace with events is to write about them. Exile equals defeat, Tanja reflects, and then the return home equals the return of memory. It is therefore a kind of death, so the moment of departure is the only true moment of freedom. Or the moment of picking up a pen, she might have added.’ Julian Evans, The Telegraph
‘This is a full to the brim, masterly book. Here is someone who can not only tell stories but also think, a writer of world class. Let us hope that the Nobel Prize committee know of her existence.’ Trouw
'Dubravka Ugresic's novel -- if you care about language and how it fails and sometimes succeeds at defining the human condition -- approaches perfection. The translation, the handling of dialects and nuances of what is essentially the same language in five or six different versions, is masterly.' The Washington Post
'I urge you to take a look at Dubravka Ugresic's The Ministry of Pain. The narrator is a brilliantly caustic Croatian university lecturer who decamps to Amsterdam in the mid 1990's to teach the literature of the former Yugoslavia to a group of former Yugoslavians. First they recreate their lost country; then they tear it down.' The Independent, Books of the Year 2005
Fabrika Serbia
Faust Vrancic Croatia
Saqi Books UK
De Geus NL
Swiat-Czarne Poland
Berlin Verlag Germany
Fayard France
Anagrama Spain
Albert Bonniers Sweden
Gyldendal Norsk Norway
Fakel Express Bulgaria
Zalozba Meander Slovenia
Tiderne Skifter Denmark
Ecco Press USA
Garzanti Italy
Kronta Lithuania
Like Kustannus Finland
Munhakdongne Korea
L’Harmattan/JAK Hungary
Serial in Hungarian Lettre International
Everest Turkey
Dituria Albania
Polirom Romania
‘Savage, quotable and perceptive. I held my breath while I raced through this entertaining volume, hoping against hope that Ugresic would sustain it to the last page. The good news is that she does, triumphantly.’ Robert McCrum, Observer
Dalkey Archive Press UK/USA
De Geus NL
Suhrkamp Germany
La Fabrica Spain
Fakel Bulgaria
Swiat Poland
Samizdat 92 Serbia
Konzor Croatia
Fayard France
Nottetempo Italy
Olga Morozova Russia
‘A brilliant, enthralling spread of storytelling and high-velocity.’ Susan Sontag
Collected together in this reissue, the novella STEFFIE CVEK IN THE JAWS OF LIFE and a collection of short stories called LIFE IS A FAIRY TALE solidify Ugresic’s reputiation as one of Eastern Europe’s most playful and inventive writers. Steffie Speck is a harassed and vulnerable typist from a lonely hearts column, whose life is shaped entirely by cliché. Ugresic weaves the lives and expectations of those marginalized into the world of popular women’s culture. Always smart and endlessly entertaining.
Dalkey Archive Press UK/USA
Samizdat 92 Serbia
Konzor Croatia
Czarne Poland
Kjarat Kiado Hungary
Sanje Slovenia
Niculescu Romania
Polish Theatre rights for Steffie Speck to Krystyna Janda in Warsaw and Ludowy in Krakow
Material: finished copies (200pp).
Ironic, playful and multilayered. The death of an anti-Franco poet who slips into the hotel pool during an international literary conference sets in motion a rapid and entertaining chain of events involving espionage, sexual intrigue, and murder.
‘Ugresic writes with a sharpened pen. Her voice is unique, her writing elegant and dangerous… Those with a bittersweet tooth for fiction will find it meltingly irresistible.’ Scotland on Sunday
Samizdat 92 Serbia
Konzor Croatia
Czarne Poland
Stigmati Bulgaria
Azbuka Russia
‘Intimate and modern at the same time, Ugresic has a unique tone of voice, unfailing in its wit and sceptical intelligence, deceptively casual in the bravery of its truth-telling: she brings one shock of recognition after another.’ Marina Warner
Samizdat 92 Serbia
Konzor Croatia
Suhrkamp Germany
‘Contains some of the most profound reflections on culture, memory and madness’ The Independent
‘Impressive and deeply felt and deserves a wide readership’ Times Literary Supplement
Samizdat 92 Serbia
Konzor Croatia
Am Oved Israel
Bompiani Italy
Cavalo de Ferro Portugal
Fayard France
Bonniers Sweden
Gyldendal Norsk Norway
Nicolescu Romania
Alfaguara/Santillana Spain
Stigmati Bulgaria
Suhrkamp Germany
Swiat Literacki Poland
Europa Hungary
Kastaniotis Greece
Dituria Albania
‘Can be placed in the company of such landmark chronicles of dissent as Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind and Vaclav Havel’s Living in Truth.’ Literary Review
Samizdat 92 Serbia
Konzor Croatia
Stigmati Bulgaria
Studenska Academic Press Slovenia
Czarne Poland
Mlada Fronta Czech