In her youth, the Croatian grandmother Nedelka, nicknamed Non-Oui, fell in love with an Italian soldier, and after the end of World War II, she followed him to Sicily. Years after that, her death marked the beginning of a tense and exciting journey for her granddaughter, named after Nedelka. A journey into the past, through her own memories and memories which have been told her, motivated by her desire to penetrate the essence of a dramatic and pervading human history.
Built as a diary, the novel flows freely through the layers of time and space - the birth of fascism and its collapse in Italy, the occupation of Croatia, post-war Sicily ... These traumatic events are the political background against which the story of a great, enduring love unfolds.
This project has been funded with support from the Creative Europe Programme of the European Commission.
Lidija Dimkovska was born in 1971 in Skopje, Macedonia. She is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. She studied Comparative Literature at the University of Skopje and took a PhD in Romanian Literature at the University of Bucharest, Romania. She has worked as a lecturer of Macedonian language and literature at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest, and as a lecturer of World Literature at the University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia. Since 2001 she has been living in Ljubljana, Slovenia, as a freelance writer and translator of Romanian and Slovenian literature into Macedonian. She has participated at numerous international literary festivals and was a writer-in-residence in Iowa, Berlin, Graz, Vienna, Salzburg, and London.In 2009, she received the Hubert Burda literary prize for young East European poets and, in 2012, she won the Tudor Arghezi international poetry prize in Romania. She is a member of the jury for the Vilenica international literary award in Slovenia, and the Zbigniew Herbert international award for poetry.
Her first book Skriena Kamera (Hidden Camera) was published in 2004, winning the Writers’ Union of Macedonia award for the best prose book of the year. It was also shortlisted for the Utrinski Vesnik award for the best novel of the year. It has been translated into Slovenian, Slovakian, Polish and Bulgarian.
Backup Life received the Writers’ Union of Macedonia award for the best prose book of the year and was also shortlisted for the Utrinski Vesnik award for the best novel of the year.
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