DUBRAVKA UGRESIC

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

NOBODY’S HOME (NIKOG NEMA DOMA)

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.’ 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, Telegraph

Material: English, German and Dutch editions (278pp)
Sales: Fabrika Serbia & Croatia; Fakel Bulgaria; Saqi UK; Berlin Verlag Germany; De Geus Holland; Anagrama Spain; ZNAK Poland; Open Letter Press, Rochester Univ. USA.

THE MINISTRY OF PAIN (MINISTARSTVO BOLI) 
THE INDEPENDENT - BOOK OF THE YEAR 2005

'...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.' 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.' Independent UK, Books of the Year for 2005

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.

Material: Original edition (295 pages) and German, English (254 pages), Dutch edition

Sales: 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.

THANK YOU FOR NOT READING
(ZABRANJENO CITANJE)

'...savage, quotable and perceptive. ...I held my breath while I raced through this entertaining volume, hoping against hope that Ugresic would sustain Thank You For Not Reading to the last page. The good news is that she does, triumphantly. But you will have to buy it to find out how.'
Robert McCrum, The Observer, January 2004

'...a considerable voice... It is hard in a short space to do justice to the sparkling, Flaubertian satire and profound anthropological quality of these essays. ...She is a writer, and this is a book, to be treasured.'Julian Evans, The Guardian, May 2004

A trenchant collection of essays that turns the spotlight on how books are published, why, and to what end. What is the matter with the book market? One fad has barely faded when another arises. And a serious debate about content slips further and further away. Ugrešic takes a hard stand against the threat of an end to literary culture.

A book about everything that makes up the life of a book today and much more. Unique, sharp, witty, insightful, poetic and intelligent, THANK YOU FOR NOT READING asks whether the act of reading, like smoking, "can have an aura of glamour only where it does not exist." Though never deviating far from questions of the cultural import and literary value of the book, Dubravka's frame of reference nevertheless accommodates Croatian football, Kirk Douglas, and, beguilingly, 'How I could have been Ivana Trump, and where I went wrong.' Shrewd, perceptive, and very funny, THANK YOU FOR NOT READING is a subversive masterpiece and a challenge to industry susceptible to fads and the production of intellectually slight but purportedly commercial work. And, in typically expansive style, Ugrešic makes her analysis have wide repercussions and relevant to all. THANK YOU FOR NOT READING (ZABRANJENO CITANJE) takes its name from a modification of the signs on trains that read 'Thank You For Not Smoking'.

Material: Many editions

Sales: Dalkey Archive Press UK and USA; Suhrkamp Germany; De Geus Holland; Samizdat 92 Serbia; Konzor Croatia; Fakel Bulgaria; Swiat Literacki Poland; La Fabrika Spain; Fayard France; Nottetempo Italy; Olga Morozova Russia.

THE MUSEUM OF UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER

Pulled by a little girl from the deepest corner of the wardrobe, a shabby-looking handbag disgorges a long-forgotten past. A silk scarf and a silver cigarette case; a gold coin and a lock of hair; from faded photos peer the faces of a generation only just gone, yet forever lost...

As the girl grows up to be a woman, her own childhood self recedes. Time moves to a faster, more violent rhythm of love and loss, betrayal and exile. In this stunningly original novel the recovered fragments are put on display: the images and anecdotes, the miscellaneous memories that made up a woman's life.

Praise for DUBRAVKA UGRESIC's novel, THE MUSEUM OF UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER:

'Splendidly ambitious... A brilliant, enthralling spread of story-telling and high-velocity reflections. In her indignation and in her sorrow Ugresic speaks for many people, many experiences. She is a writer to follow. A writer to be cherished.' Susan Sontag

'Contains some of the most profound reflections on culture, memory and madness you will ever read.' Carole Angier, The Independent

'Ugresic writes with a sharpened pen. Her voice is unique, her writing elegant and dangerous...irresistible.' Scotland on Sunday

'Ugresic must be numbered among what Jacques Maritain called the dreamers of the true; she draws us into the dream.' New York Times

'Like Nabokov, Ugresic affirms our ability to remember as a source for saving our moral and compassionate identity.' Washington Post

'Virginia Woolf wrote in the prelude to a war, Dubravka Ugresic in the aftermath of one: both are vivid in their denunciation of destructive forces and in their evocation of what is at stake... Impressive an deeply felt – not characteristics that always go together - and deserves a wide readership.'Times Literary Supplement

'With The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, Dubravka Ugresic has invented a new verbal music to match the 'dreamed reality' of present history… The Museum of Unconditional Surrender lingers in the mind; no novel has evoked so mordantly the personal costs of the changing political world map.' Marina Warner

'Dubravka Ugresic is the philosopher of evil and exile, and the storyteller of the many shattered lives the wars in former Yugoslavia produced. I know no one who writes better or thinks more clearly about these troubled times. This is an utterly original, beautiful and supremely intelligent novel.' Charles Simic

LEND ME YOUR CHARACTER

‘A brilliant, enthralling spread of storytelling and high-velocity reflections.’ Susan Sontag

The pieces collected in here - the novella STEFFIE CVEK IN THE JAWS OF LIFE and a collection of short stories entitled LIFE IS A FAIRY TALE - solidify Dubravka Ugresic’s reputation as one of Eastern Europe’s most playful and inventive writers.

Material: English language edition (246 pages); original edition

Sales: Dalkey Archive Press UK/USA; Czarne Poland; Samizdat 92 Serbia; Konzor Croatia.

Dubravka Ugresic’s other publications include FORDING THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS; HAVE A NICE DAY: From the Balkan War to the American Dream; THE CULTURE OF LIES.

Publishers of Dubravka Ugresic: Graficki Zavod Hrvatske and August Cesarec Croatia; Suhrkamp Germany; Northwestern University Press and New Directions USA; Virago Press and Weidenfeld & Nicholson UK; Nigh & Van Ditmar NL; Plon and Fayard France; Mlada Fronta Czech; Raduga Russia; Rilindija Albania; Swiat Poland; Lumi Slovenia; Rosinante Denmark; Stigmati Bulgaria; Europa Hungary; Kastaniotis Greece; Gyldendal Norsk Norway; Bompiani Italy; Alfaguara Spain; Cavalo de Ferro Portugal; Europa and Kigarat Kiado Hungary;Niculescu Romania; Am Oved;

DUBRAVKA UGRESIC (1949) has held the following posts: 1974-93 Lecturer at Institute for Theory of Literature, University of Zagreb; 1989 & 1992 Visiting Lecturer at Wesleyan University USA; 1996-97 Visiting Lecturer at University of Amsterdam; 1998/99 Frey Foundation Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of North Carolina USA; 2001 Visiting Lecturer at UCLA, USA; 2002 Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University, USA.

She has received grants from: NIAS (Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies) 2002/3; Budapest Collegium, Institute for Advanced Studies 2000; Ludo Pieters Gusetwriter Fund, Amsterdam 1996/7; The Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, Cambridge, USA 1995/6; DAAD (Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst) Berlin, Germany 1994; International Writers Workshop, Iowa City, USA 1983. She is based in Amsterdam.

www.dubravkaugresic.com

Author photograph by Walter White www.walterwhite.co.uk