Slavenka Drakulić

Slavenka Drakulić

Slavenka Drakulić (born July 4, 1949) is a Croatian novelist and non-fiction writer who lives in Sweden.

Drakulić was born in Rijeka, PR 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 (both in Zagreb), writing mainly on feminist issues.

Biography

Drakulić temporarily left Croatia for Sweden in the early 1990s for political reasons. A notorious unsigned 1992 Globus article (Slaven Letica, a known sociologist, former advisor to President Franjo Tudjman and writer, subsequently admitted to being its author) 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 in feminist fashion, 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.

Drakulić has written for various newspapers and magazines in many different languages, including The Nation, La Stampa, Dagens Nyheter, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Eurozine, and Politiken.

Her noted recent 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. She also wrote "How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed" which is the non-fiction account of Drakulic's life under communism.

Her 2008 novel, Frida's Bed, is based on a biography of a 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.

Drakulić lives in Stockholm and Zagreb.

Bibliography

Fiction

• "Holograms Of Fear" Hutchinson, London (1992).
• "Marble Skin" Hutchinson, London (1993).
• "The Taste of a Man" Abacus, London (1997)
• "S -a novel about Balkans" (also known as: "As If I Am Not There") (1999). Made into a movie "As if I am not there", directed by Juanita Wilson.
• "Frida's Bed" Penguin USA, New York (2008),^[1]

Non-fiction

• "Smrtni grijesi feminizma" (1984) only in Croatian
• "How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed", Hutchinson, London (1991).
• "Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of the War", W.W. Norton, New York (1993).
• "Cafe Europa: Life After Communism" Abacus, London (1996)
• "They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in the Hague" Abacus -TimeWarner, London (2004)
• "Tijelo njenog tijela" (2006) available in Croatian, German and Polish
• "Two Underdogs and a cat", Seagull Books . London, NY, Calcutta (2009)
• "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", Penguin, New York, (2011)

Articles

• We Are All Albanians 1999
• Bosnian Women Witness 2001
• Crime in the circles of power October 2008
• Slavenka Drakulic Interview 2009
• Articles on Eurozine
• Articles in The Nation
• Articles in The Guardian
• Rape as a Weapon of War 2008
• Slavenka Drakulic and Katha Pollitt in conversation 2011

References

External links

• The official Slavenka Drakulic Site
• Slavenka Drakulic Interview 2009
• Slavenka Drakulic receives the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding
• Extract from "Two Underdogs and a Cat"